In January 1988, a television helicopter over the Sahara caught something that should not have been possible.
Ari Vatanen was flat out in a works Peugeot 405 Turbo 16.
Then an eleven-tonne truck appeared beside him.
It drew level at more than 200 kilometres an hour.
And then it pulled away.
The truck was the DAF TurboTwin X1.
It had two 11.6-litre diesel engines.
Six turbochargers.
Around 1,200 horsepower.
And it had been built by a Dutch haulier who had decided that simply winning the truck class of the Paris–Dakar wasn't ambitious enough.
He wanted to beat the cars.
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🏁 IN THIS EPISODE
We trace the extraordinary story of Jan de Rooy and the DAF TurboTwin — from a trucking-company owner racing tiny DAF coupés on weekends to building one of the fastest rally trucks ever created.
When de Rooy first entered the Paris–Dakar in 1982, his DAF NTT 2800 made around 330 horsepower, drove only its rear wheels and got stuck constantly.
He finished anyway.
But de Rooy wasn't interested in simply surviving the Dakar.
He wanted a truck that could run with the cars.
The problem was weight.
A heavy truck needed enormous momentum to climb soft dunes, but extracting enough power from a single production diesel risked destroying it in the Saharan heat.
So de Rooy came up with a wonderfully simple solution.
Use two engines.
The first experiment was the bizarre 1984 "Two-Headed Monster", with two DAF cabs mounted back to back and an engine underneath each one.
One engine drove the front axle.
The other drove the rear.
By 1986, DAF had thrown away the production chassis entirely and created the first proper TurboTwin.
Then came the TurboTwin II.
Two twin-turbo diesel engines.
Nearly 1,000 horsepower.
An aluminium chassis.
And in 1987, Jan de Rooy won the Dakar truck category by more than fourteen hours.
He finished eleventh overall.
Every vehicle ahead of him was a car.
So for 1988, DAF went even further.
The new 95 TurboTwin X1 used two 11.6-litre inline-six engines, each fitted with three turbochargers and producing around 600 horsepower.
Together they made roughly 1,200 horsepower and around 4,700 Nm of torque.
Each engine had its own gearbox.
Each drove its own axle.
A single gear lever shifted both transmissions together.
And the only thing really connecting the front drivetrain to the rear was the Sahara underneath it.
On rough, open desert, the TurboTwin was frighteningly fast.
Period figures put 0–100 km/h at around 8.5 seconds.
Top speed was reportedly limited to 220 km/h.
DAF hadn't built it merely to win the truck category.
It wanted to win the entire Paris–Dakar.
Then came the moment that made the TurboTwin legendary.
A television helicopter filmed Ari Vatanen's Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 racing across the desert.
The DAF appeared beside him.
For several seconds, the works rally car and an eleven-tonne truck ran side by side at more than 200 km/h.
Then de Rooy pulled ahead.
The X1 now sits in the DAF Museum in Eindhoven.
And modern Dakar trucks are speed-limited to around 135 km/h.
In 1988, there was no such limit.
Which is how, for one extraordinary moment in the Sahara, an eleven-tonne DAF truck pulled alongside one of the world's best rally drivers at more than 200 kilometres an hour...
and simply drove past him.
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🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT
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https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett
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#DAF #DAFTurboTwin #ParisDakar #DakarRally #JanDeRooy #AriVatanen #RallyRaid #Motorsport #TruckRacing #CarHistory #AutomotiveHistory #TheCarNerd
