Dacia Duster
“THE DUSTER DESERVED A SPRINKLE OF SPECIAL, AND I COULD TASTE THE POSSIBILITIES”
ONE-OFF RETURN £14,400 OTR/£15,050 as tested
WHY IT’S HERE
A cool Dacia Duster? You decide...
DRIVER
Tom Ford
BEING A FAN OF FITNESS FOR PURPOSE MEANS THAT SOMETIMES you have to forgo style for substance, allow function precedence over form. And although the Dacia Duster is by no means a bad looking small SUV, it isn’t, it has to be said, something you double take on. Not something that would necessarily provoke the covetous look back every time you walked away from it. Yes it’s cheap to insure, cheap to run, cheap to fix, but it isn’t – at least outside of those very practical criteria – particularly cool. Which, after a few months, started to sound very much like a challenge. So I decided to play with sensible couture.
Yeah, I know – it also sounds like a hiding to nothing, but with a fondness for quirky, I started looking at my options. Unfortunately, most of the time, the reason things haven’t been done before is that they aren’t worth doing. And yet... the Duster deserved a sprinkle of special, and I could taste the possibilities. Possibilities that mainly involved having a good look at the suspension set-up with my mate Ben from String Theory Garage (also an inveterate car-meddler – except he knows what he’s doing) – and realising that the Duster’s simplicity actually allowed for some creative applications in terms of suspension.
Now, a lot of people would be expecting at this point that I would immediately lift the Duster, stick on some big tyres and a lightbar, roofrack the hell out of it and make a cheap Dakar-lite. But that seemed… too obvious. It also seemed a bit weird when the car only drove the front wheels, meaning it would be a bit rubbish off-road anyway. So I decided, looking at the spec – it’s essentially a tall hatchback – to go low, and try and make this tall, unsporting, lifted hatch handle a little bit. But also like, low-low. Stance low. Annoy people low. Provoke the kind of comments that start with ‘you’ve ruined that’... You think I’m kidding – that was the first thing TopGear’s Charlie Turner said when he saw it.
An Eibach RS fast road kit designed for a MkVII Ford Fiesta was duly dispatched and fitted, and, after much fettling, dropped the Duster so far into the floor the wheels wouldn’t move. Ah. Still, Ben adjusted and
fettled, shimmed and wound out, and the little Dacia started to look like a thing. Dave at the Mission Motorsport livery department helped me translate a weird back-of-envelope drawing of some stripes into a real set of vinyls – and the Duster suddenly looked like some sort of German training shoe. Then there are the wheels, for which I approached Weller Wheels – a UK company specialising in fully built steel wheels. I secured a mate’s rate of £250 per wheel, and ordered a set of 17s, with a wider 9.5-inch girth and lacquer over the raw steel rather than paint. Nankang tyres in a slightly smaller size to give a bit of balloon stretch – like Singer does with its reimagined 911s – and the Duster came alive.
As a final flourish, I had my friend Ralph at Ralph Hosier Engineering build a customised roofbox, a roofbox with a rally pod on the front, powered by a solar panel on the top of the box, and a bike battery and management module on the inside for what remained of the budget. Which he did. And the cost of the whole lot? Just £3,500. You could buy an old Duster for £4k and do this, and have a genuinely interesting car that handles like a slightly top heavy warm hatch with modest power for around £7k if you didn’t have the roofbox.
So here’s the question: do you think we’ve made a Dacia Duster cool, or have we mucked it up?
“I DECIDED TO GO LOW, AND TRY TO MAKE THIS UNSPORTING, LIFTED HATCH HANDLE A LITTLE BIT”