Desert stormer

This is the Porsche 911 Dakar. It has no rear seats, it rides 50mm higher than normal and therefore looks a bit gangly in the flesh. It also weighs a bit because it’s been beefed up to deal with terrain it may never encounter.

And at £173,000 it’s heinously expensive, even for a Porsche. Think of it as a Tonka toy for grown-up small boys with deep pockets.

The 911 Dakar is a seriously capable car despite its exterior. It looks as if it should be great fun to drive and, as we discovered in the Sahara recently, that very much turns out to be true.

Once you strip away its Action Man suit, the Dakar is a 911 GTS, which means it is a very fast car indeed. It’s powered by a 473bhp 3.0-litre twin-turbo flat six that can fire it to 62mph in a claimed 3.4sec.

Its eight-speed PDK gearbox is exactly the same as the one you get in a 911 GTS, as are its brakes, its four-wheel steering system and differentials – because inevitably the Dakar is four-wheel drive.

Where it differs from a GTS is in its suspension, tyres, ride height and certain bits of bodywork, much of which has been re-engineered to withstand the onslaught of rough going.

So the springs are longer and softer, the dampers tougher and the tyres specially developed all-terrain

Rally-inspired 911 is a 4x4 sensation

semi-knobblies by Pirelli. The entire underside has been beefed up with CFD panels fitted front to back to prevent rocks from entering its gizzards.

You can also raise the ride height by a further 30mm electronically if serious ground clearance is needed.

There are two new drive modes labelled Rallye and Offroad.

Engage the first and everything from the throttle to the diffs to the traction control goes into a maximum attack setting. Engage the latter and the responses become softer, gentler, calmer – to provide maximum cross-country ability when you need to adopt a smoother pace.

We drove the Dakar for two days across some seriously wild terrain in the Sahara, and not once did it get stuck. Porsche claims the Dakar can go pretty much anywhere that a Cayenne SUV can, only a lot faster while providing a lot more fun for whoever is behind the wheel.

Which makes it even more amazing to discover that, back on normal roads, it feels and drives much like a regular 911, even if the knobbly tyres are a bit noisier than you’d expect and the suspension fractionally less precise.

Downsides? As mentioned, there are no rear seats, the fuel tank is on the small side at 67 litres for a car with a healthy thirst for petrol, and the bucket seats are excellent when you’re going for it but uncomfortable

when you’re not. Additionally, although it’s crazily expensive, you can’t buy one because all 2,500 have already sold out, meaning its rich owners will likely get richer still in the long run.

But purely as a car to drive and to appreciate, the Dakar is sensational.

In many ways it’s one of the most intriguing 911s there has ever been, which isn’t bad considering they’ve been churning them out now for 60 years and counting.