911 Dakar Who？ New Ultimate Off-Road Porsche!

This is the Marc-Philippe Gemballa Marcienne. A 750bhp, very specific take on what it means to be an off-road Porsche. But what do you do with a car like that, when you're in a place like this? Well, you... And then you... You probably want to... And you'd obviously... And then you poke. So up we go. You prod. And you try not to. But before we do all that, we've got to figure out exactly what we're dealing with here, because this isn't a resto mod or a one-off custom car, but a limited series production car, one of 40, by the second generation of one of the most famous names in Porsche modifying. And it's being billed as an adventure sports car. Now, it's called the Marcienne, which is a French word for Martian, because it was developed here, in the UAE, whose distinctive red sands resemble, if you squint, Mars. Hence the name. Now, I hear you. Porsche already cooks this flavour with the 911 Dakar, and it does it extremely well. I actually think the Dakar is the best 911 on sale for daily use. It'd be the one I'd buy anyway. But the Marcienne takes the idea of the 911 Dakar, the core aspects, and makes it more of everything. Honestly, it spits out charisma with the violence of an arc welder. That is entirely bespoke carbon fibre bodywork, supplied by the company that also does five different F1 teams. It's inspired by the 959 Dakar cars, and it was designed by a guy called Alain de Rossier, who also did Porsche's 908 concept. Now, on the front, you'll notice a completely redesigned front bumper with a load of extra ducting, but the interesting parts start up here, because you'll notice there's a big duct that draws hot air away from a centrally mounted radiator and off out around the A-pillars. Now, that's a bit like a GT3 RS, if you're familiar with the racier side of things. Actually, there is something really cool under here, but I'll show you that later. But it's from the bonnet back where things get really mental. Now, there are some sort of carbon fibre flicks that come up from the bottom of the lip on the front bumper, but you realise from the side that the roofline is pure 911, but everything else has changed. Small detail. You see these mirrors? They look like 911 RSR racing mirrors, but these ones actually have cameras under here, and they've got the fully electrical operation that you get with a normal road car. They've even got sacrificial bolts just down here, so if you hit someone with it, they just snap off and don't hurt anyone. And again, detail. The race car actually has a very sharp edge on this back surface. This has all been rounded off to meet homologation rules. Even the door handles here, look, they've been redesigned. But it's down the side of the car that you start to see the big differences. It's got wider arches, front and rear, to cope with new levels of axle articulation, which we'll show you later, but gets better when you raise the suspension up. You've got vents behind the front wheel, and then these big lateral intakes to feed the engine at the back. And then this movement here, this wide arch, starts to come up and round into this big fixed rear wing, which is very 959. And then, as you get to the back, it's very wide and very striking, and it has two mortar-sized exhausts. This is not an EV, and that is a bespoke titanium Akrapovic system. Weirdly, this is one of those cars that reminds me of the 935 Moby Dick racing Porsche, because you can see the ghostly bum of the 992-generation Turbo S in there, like it's been eaten. But that's actually not all that surprising, because the Marcian is based on the bones of a Porsche 911 Turbo S, so that means four-wheel drive and the familiar 3.8-litre flat-six stuffed in the back here. But this is not the 640bhp of the Turbo S, but it's been tuned by RUF to produce 750. Now, that is a lot, but in a world of 1,000bhp cars, it doesn't feel headline-grabbing excessive. Now, 750bhp and getting on for 700lb-ft are very generous figures, but these engines can be tuned to well in excess of 1,000bhp. But MPG, that's Marc-Philippe Gemballa to you and I, felt that going for max horsepower wasn't the point. It had to be capable and usable, and blowing up at 10,000 miles limits your capability. Let's face it, unless you're a WRC driver, 750bhp should be enough, and if you are, then there's actually an 830bhp upgrade. Like this one. Bloody hell! So, what about speed? Well, the Marcienne comes with on- or off-road tyres, both mounted on their own sets of wheels. And if it's on the street rubber, it'll do 0-62mph in about 2.7 seconds, and run on to 205mph! A bit less on the off-road rubber that we've got here. Honestly, on the road, it just feels like a very healthy Turbo S in terms of performance, and it weighs the same as the standard car, so that makes sense. It's very fast and lightly brutal, but not ridiculous. And if you're a dedicated dune basher, you can order it with Riga Rally suspension and a fixed ride height, but this car has KW Automotive adjustable suspension, so you can do 120mm on the street, which is Turbo S ride height, and then change to 250mm at the touch of a button. So, up we go. But there is one other thing I want to show you, and that's this. If I just pop that open... You know I said there was something under the bonnet that was a bit of fun? Well, it is true that there's a big fan underneath here that cools the car down, but also there's this tiny little frunk, and if I open this up, there is an onboard compressor so you can change the tyre pressures in your tyres according to what you're doing. Now, if you're going to air up, you just plug that on there, and then you have perfectly good air line. But right now we're going into the dunes, so I'm going to let some air out of the tyres. So give me a second. It's also got intelligent damper control, so in both situations, both on and off-road, it does what it should do. Nice and taut on a road, soft and squidgy off it. You choose from the drive mode selector here on the wheel, and you get the standard Porsche modes as well as individual specialities, and they'll manage stuff like ride height, dampers, transmission settings, engine maps and throttle response. The bottom is completely armoured in a flat floor of aluminium plating, and it's got a revised and strengthened eight-speed double-clutch box, so you don't need to worry about making your own gear changes when bouncing over a Dune 3. The Porsche four-wheel drive system is always just a little bit rear-biased, which makes it really good fun, because it skids around, and then the front just helps you out. And then it's got a kind of OEM bus feel, because the drive shafts are actually extended and strengthened Turbo S items, but with KN adapted joints to give you that axle articulation when your wheels are bouncing around like a trophy truck. But the weird thing about the Marciano is actually how comfortable and usable it is all the time, and a lot of that has to do with the interior. So you've got a wild-looking car that's as much fun on-road as it is off it, but what about the interior? Well, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of Porsche in here, but I don't think that's a problem, because if it ain't broke and all that, and Gambano has resisted the temptation to make the entire interior of unicorn tears and pink sparkles. So you have basically a couple of little items that have the logo stitched into them. There's a lot of lovely blue Alcantara in this car, but then when you start to look properly, there's a lot of detail. Again, like the exterior, it's subtle, but it's there. Immediately, you notice this big raised centre console, which reminds me of a Carrera GT, so there's heritage and inspiration there. Custom gear knob with blue-tinted carbon. Once you've seen the blue-tinted carbon, you notice it everywhere. So this car reflects its exterior colour by having all of the carbon that's normally in a Turbo S re-tinted blue. There's little fabric straps to open the door, like a GT Series Porsche. Then in this particular car, we've got these fixed carbon buckets, which, again, have been completely stripped down, sanded back, the carbon fibre tinted blue, and then reassembled. But the seats themselves haven't been redesigned. There's a half-carbon fibre rear roll cage, again, blue-tinted carbon fibre, but you can actually option four seats without the roll cage. The rest of it is just like a Turbo S, so it's very simple, very clean, very clear. And then there's a little plaque that says number 40 of 40. And the interesting thing here is that all of the systems in this car, the original Porsche systems, they all work. So you've got the same drive mode selector, the same paddles behind the wheel, the same layout of the dash, the same functionality from all of the switches on the raised centre. This is a car that has been deeply developed. If you told me this was a Porsche product, I'd believe you. But when you get out into the dunes, you start to believe the hype that the Marcian is just that little bit more of everything. Now the best bit about the Marcian is really that it's so light and so four-wheel drive and the Porsche stuff works so well that you can just attack massive dunes like this one. Just got to build up a bit of speed and keep going. Get it boosting and it just trots up it. Down the dunes. Now it's probably worth mentioning that the blue car we used for filming had a tiny issue that it meant it couldn't switch off its traction control fully, a rogue line of code that we couldn't fix in the desert. But handily, Gemballa had also brought along their prototype and the white Marcian had fully disabled traction. So we also drove that one, which was utterly epic and that was with less power than the blue car. So we're confident that the blue one would have been even better if it were let fully loose. But it still bombs around really nicely and that traction is very Porsche. It's really strange. It just finds grip where you don't really expect it. The thing is, even with the little traction control issue, the blue car still had excessive capability, mainly because it's relatively light. It weighs pretty much the same as a normal Turbo S but it feels less like an off-roader and more like a buggy. It doesn't chew through the landscape like an off-roader but skitters across it like an insect, glomming the available traction together to skim across the surface. And it's always got the torque and power to make the most of the limited traction. It really is deeply impressive. You can't see where you're going out here. It gets a little bit scary. Maybe I started to get a little bit too confident seeing as the Martien conversion costs 500,000 euros or about 417,000 pounds at current exchange rates. A Porsche 911 Turbo S to convert, about 168,000. So you're looking at, very roughly, about 585,000 pounds. But that feels relatively cheap at this end of the market. And that seems to be MPG's plan. High-end, limited-run, modern super things with a heavy dose of inspiration from the past and the future. But if we really want to know what's going on in Marc-Philippe Gemballa's head, there's really only one person we should be asking. How come you've got to where you are and how did the Martien appear? I kind of grew up around 911s so that was my surrounding since childhood. When I actually decided to follow my family's history and my father's footsteps, I wanted to understand what do clients actually want? What is the perfect driver's car? Because along the way, the tuning segment has changed. It's not about setting the next world record on the Nordschleife because now every few weeks, actually they're getting superseded by the new AMG or the new Porsche 1200 horsepower. So I kind of felt the horsepower game is over. That's not something special anymore. So understanding that and also the tuning or let's say the aftermarket offering already a lot of stuff that the tuning businesses were supplying back then already from factory now. So you can get a nice wheel, you can get a nice bespoke, completely customized interior through the Sonderwunsch program or the PTS colors. They allow you to really go crazy. So I realized when building a sustainable business but at the same time, you know, building a car that car guys really appreciate, we thought we really have to do to come up with something really special. So was it customers that you or people you know that were telling you that they wanted something a little bit more inspired? Because like an everyday kind of adventure sports car is quite a departure and you're a young guy. So is it because were you inspired by customers? Were they telling you what they wanted? Or was this an idea that came from you? I started basically meeting a lot of my father's old clients, understanding what they wanted. So really starting at the core what these collectors appreciate and there was a huge trend talking about the 80s with Porsche, participating in the Dakar with these vintage 911s bashing through the dunes. But no one really did anything on a modern platform that's off-road capable. So then all my father's cars have been always based on the newest platform. So for us it was clear to do a project on the latest technology. See the weird thing is it feels it's not a resto model but it also feels very much more than a tuner car. It's almost like a future mod Kind of, yeah. If that's a term already. But we just made it up. It's weird that the car feels like a series production car. And I think that's a really big compliment. But it's like a car you have to drive. It's very experiential. It vibrates. It makes noise. It oversteers. It does all of those kind of things. Is that what you were hearing people were sort of almost coming back to? You know obviously with all the new cars coming out you have a lot of things that actually drivers appreciate fading away like the sound. And some cars sounding like a vacuum cleaner and you can't really enjoy the sound experience anymore. You know? So we really wanted to create a car that collectors, drivers will appreciate. So that's why we also ended up doing a completely bespoke titanium exhaust system with Akrapovic delivering that very unique sound on the car which drivers and our clients are appreciating. In the design I really like the fact that it's not like an outrageous tuner car. It's actually very subtle but still striking. How did you balance that? So our designer is Alain Derosier and I got inspired by his 908 project he did as an homage and a modern interpretation of the 908 and this fascinated me a lot this modern but still timeless design language. We got inspired by the Paris Dakar rally era but at the same time also we want to create our own design language and have a holistic approach. Instead of just adding a rear spoiler or a front spoiler or some cool wheels we actually we didn't stop at any of the even the details. The rear light for example it's completely bespoke it's not the original It's my favourite angle of the car. Yeah and the exhaust position is not original anymore we changed the exhaust position as well so hence we had to make a completely new system. The door handles are our own the mirrors have been created specifically for the car. So come on then what's next? Well we really want to make our clients happy first before we are actually even thinking about launching the next car but of course we have a lot of ideas that might go more into the road slash track focus direction. But Mark you're a young guy and you've created this whole company that has now started to deliver 40 cars and you're only 31 and you started this when? When you were 26? 26, 27 I actually can't remember but yeah So that's a baby that must have been tough surely. Yeah I mean I think this was kind of like always the plan my dad always wanted me to do this and yeah I've been kind of growing up with the surrounding so it was never really a question what I'm gonna do but yeah of course to to start your own company is already a challenge but to build your own car is even more so yeah so that's my daily motivation to get up in the morning So there you have it the Marc-Philippe Gemballa Marcienne king of the road and off it I know that Singer and Tuthill made a similar thing with the ACS the all-terrain competition study but there were only ever two and they cost many body parts on the black market Do you know what? In a world full of multi-million pound restomods I actually think the Marcienne is really good value I know what am I saying? But this is a fun exciting exclusive car with a whole load of passion behind it and it shows because it's special in fact there's only one problem with the Marcienne and that's that they're all sold