This extraordinary one-off 911 marks the end of Porsche's Dakar cars

Did you know that in 1984’s Paris-Dakar rally, Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur’s 911 suffered a cable fire punting the pair right back to 139th place? Amazingly, they finished sixth.

Another 911 entered in that year’s race ended up 26th. The winner? That’d be René Metge and Dominique Lemoyne, who emerged victorious from the Paris-Dakar’s gruelling 11,000km in their modified Porsche 911, with its twin shocks and raised suspension and reinforced shell and new AWD system and lightweight plastic body panels.

And it’s that car – the car that marked the 911’s first ever victory in The World’s Toughest Off-Road Race – this wild special edition pays tribute to. It’s a new-age 911 Dakar, commissioned by an Italian collector of sports cars, that celebrates… the end of the new-age 911 Dakar.

Yup, all 2,500 992-gen Dakars have been built, Porsche tells us. This one’s been created by the dream-makers over at Sonderwunsch to mark the end of the road for the car that doesn’t like roads, who’ve layered on a three-tone paint job by hand containing a lot of yellow, a lot of dark blue, and a bit of light blue. It’s possibly the lairiest spec we’ve seen.

The 911 Dakar gets a fairly lairy drivetrain don’t forget. Underneath the ‘Signalyellow’ and ‘Lampedusablue’ body (and wheels), behind the accented headlights and yellow against black interior, there’s the Carrera 4 GTS’s bones.

Which means a 3.0-litre twin-turbo flat-six, 475bhp, an eight-speed PDK ‘box, AWD, many modes, and much speed: 0-62mph takes just 3.4s. A far cry from what Metge and Lemoyne used to win the 1984 race.

In 2024, you’ll have a chance to have a poke around this very special Sonderwunsch 911, because Porsche is showing it off in its museum before it heads off to its new home.