The moment Peugeot descended on the Paris-Dakar, Mitsubishi’s representatives knew they had a fight on their hands. Its Pajero, which had handily won the race for the Japanese carmaker just a few years prior, needed a thorough re-evaluation if it were to remain competitive, and starting in 1988 that’s just what it received. Now, amid soaring prices for vintage production-line Pajeros on the collector-car market, one of those 1988 Paris-Dakar Pajeros will cross the block, expected to sell for a quarter of a million dollars or more.
The Pajero’s history with the Paris-Dakar dates back nearly to the introduction of the four-wheel-drive SUV, which debuted in May 1982 as a replacement for the Jeeps that Mitsubishi built under license and which Mitsubishi sold in the United States as the Montero and as the Dodge Raider. With a 4G54 2.6L four-cylinder gasoline engine, torsion-bar independent front suspension, and four-wheel-drive, Mitsubishi racing officials determined the Pajero would do well in the Paris-Dakar. After some blueprinting in Kyoto and reinforcement and rally prep by Sonauto, Mitsubishi’s French importer, Mitsubishi entered four Pajeros in the production car class in the 1983 race. None of the four finished in the top 10, but Andrew Cowan and George Debussy still finished first and second in their class, which Mitsubishi considered a victory.
Mitsubishi upgraded to the turbocharged version of the 4G54 from the Starion, switched first to the Modified Production car class and then to the Prototype class, and managed to notch another class win in 1984, followed by an overall win and second-place finish in 1985, then a trio of top-10 finishes (behind the Porsche 959 supercar) in 1986, but the most significant challenge to Mitsubishi’s Dakar success came in 1987 when Peugeot entered the fray. The French carmaker had taken the final two World Rally Championship Group B titles in its Peugeot 205 T16, but the FIA’s ban on Group B after the end of the 1986 season left Peugeot with a lot of motorsports investment and nowhere to compete, so Peugeot officials turned their eye to the Paris-Dakar.
As many Paris-Dakar contestants complained, Peugeot didn’t simply enter the race to win, it entered to dominate. “The team deployed 30 mechanics and enormous supply of spare parts, preparing a practically new car each night for the next day,” Mitsubishi noted in its history of the race. “(Peugeot driver Ari Vatanen) tackled the marathon rally as a series of sprint-type rallies and fought a hard battle every day.” In the end, Mitsubishi placed third, about four hours behind Vatanen.
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To remain competitive, Mitsubishi and Sonauto made the most wide-ranging changes to the Pajero to date. It rode on a shorter 4.03-meter wheelbase, benefited from a longer-travel suspension, received a power boost to 275 horsepower thanks to an increase in compression, and was fitted with a larger 400-liter fuel tank. Because the Pajero had all the aerodynamics of the shipping container it arrived in, Mitsubishi tasked its Passenger Car Technology Center back in Japan with redesigning the body to be more slippery, fine-tuning it in a wind tunnel to ultimately reduce the body’s coefficient of drag by 20 percent.
Still, it retained its predecessors’ same basic ladder-frame chassis, rather than the Peugeot cars’ tube-frame structure, for which Mitsubishi granted Peugeot the advantage. Paris-Dakar veteran Pierre Lartigue – who’d previously raced Range Rovers and Lada Nivas – joined Cowan and Kenjiro Shinozuka on the Mitsubishi team and even managed to win one of the early stages before throwing in the towel, reportedly due to overheating. (This was the same Paris-Dakar in which Vatanen’s Peugeot was stolen as he was leading the race, putting him out of contention.) Juha Kankkunen won the race for Peugeot, but Shinozuka managed a second-place finish.
The 1988 Paris-Dakar Rally
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Lartigue and the Pajero would both go on to greater success in the Paris-Dakar: After finishing second in a Pajero in 1991, Lartigue switched to Citroen and three-peated the race from 1994 through 1996; Pajeros bookended Lartigue’s success with overall wins in 1992 and 1993, 1997 and 1998, and then the remarkable string of seven consecutive wins from 2001 to 2007.
Still, Lartigue had a soft spot for that 1988 Pajero. After the Paris-Dakar, he took a pair of second-place finishes in it in the Rallye de Tunisie and the Rallye de l’Atlas, won the Course de Cote TT de Brive and the 1989 Rallye de Tunisie, and then turned in a pair of sixth-place finishes at the Rallye TT de Cognac and the Rallye TT de Vitrolles. And despite the switch to Citroen, he held on to the Pajero from the time Mitsubishi was done with it after the 1989 rallying season until 2021.
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Photo courtesy Aguttes
Lartigue’s Pajero has since passed to a French collector, who restored it to its 1988 Paris-Dakar condition and made it the centerpiece of a small collection of Dakar vehicles, including a 1976 Opel Manta GT/E that had previously run in the European Rally Championship, a 1986 Audi Quattro placed atop a Range Rover chassis by Franco de Paoli, a 1981 Range Rover that ran the Paris-Dakar when new, and a 1991 Range Rover also prepared for the Paris-Dakar by de Paoli, all of which French auction house Aguttes will put up for bid in its spring sale. The Opel and Range Rovers are expected to sell for anywhere from €40,000 (about $44,000) to €80,000 (about $88,000) while the Quattro is expected to sell for €150,000 (about $165,000) to €250,000 (about $275,000) and the Pajero is expected to sell for €250,000 (about $275,000) to €350,000 (about $380,000). While production-line Pajeros (and Monteros and Dodge Raiders) don’t come close to those numbers, the Pajero Evolution that Mitsubishi offered from 1997 to 1999 to homologate the company’s entries in the Paris-Dakar has, over the last year or so, steeply climbed in value with examples now selling for anywhere from $35,000 to $50,000.
The Aguttes spring sale will take place April 2 at Hotel Espace Champerret in Paris. For more information, visit Aguttes.com.
