Fouquet Under the skin of a classic off-road race car

from 4x4 Magazine - September 2022

by Assignment Media Ltd

Peugeot or Citroen Related SUVs go head to head – with surprising results

French Fancy

When your off-road race truck has fi nally hit peak perfection and turned you into a champion, your fi rst instinct might not be to get rid of it. But having taken his class title in the French Tout Terrain championship, Dave Fletcher knew it was time for his Range Rover to give way to something altogether less British

Words: Gary Noskill Pictures: Phil Masters

When the vehicle you’ve built has just carried you to a class win in one of the world’s most fi ercely contested off-road racing series, your immediate reaction might not be to start driving something else instead. But that’s exactly what Hampshire’s Dave Fletcher did when he bought a new vehicle to replace his victorious Range Rover.

Bizarre behaviour? Not at all. Because while the Range Rover still had plenty of racing left in it, his new machine was right off the top shelf when it comes to off-road racing technology – and its custom-built French background made it the ideal vehicle in which to mount a credible assault on its home country’s Tout Terrain championship.

A part of a dedicated group of British racers whose comping ambitions had crossed the Channel, Dave and his navigator Marcus Healey regularly locked horns with a Frenchman by the name of Joel Clevenot, who from 1999 had been the owner of a long-wheelbase Fouquet Mk III. Styled very vaguely around the appearance of a Citroën Xantia and intended specifi cally for endurance racing, this version of the Fouquet was designed around the need for a high-capacity fuel tank. As such, it carried more weight than would normally

be necessary for the comparatively short events featured in the Tout Terrain series – but its size made it the perfect vehicle for Dave and Marcus.

Why? For the very simple reason that they’re both extremely tall, meaning a standard racer would have been intolerably uncomfortable – and an uncomfortable crew is never a fast one.

In order to accommodate them, the vehicle was fitted with a new standard-sized fuel tank, creaating room for its seats to be moved far enough back to let them fit – a modification which also involved its floor being dropped by around 50mm. The seats in question were outsize units, custom-built for the team by Motordrive in a glassfibre Kevlar composite, and they were augmented with Willans harnesses featuring three-inch belts and six-point fixings. Fitted about nine inches further back and six inches lower than the standard seats they replaced, they hit the nail on the head.

‘We’ve both been relatively uncomfortable in previous seats,’ said Dave, ‘and we can’t get over the transformation. The ride in the Fouquet is very good, and the seats aren’t quite as critical. But in the Range Rover, it meant the difference between being able to carry speed over bumps or having to back off because it was hurting too much.’

So far, apart from a change of colour and the addition of a rakish looking spoiler for purely cosmetic reasons, that’s about all in the way of changes that have been wrought to the vehicle in the hands of its new owners. When you’ve bought a vehicle with this pedigree, you don’t need to spend time re-inventing the wheel.

Fouquet, the company behind the eponymous vehicle, is a father-and-son outfit based in a small village near Bordeaux. Its cars are based on a full spaceframe carrying an all-independent suspension set-up and rear-mounted engine, the classic design for ultimate high-speed performance. Fouquet makes the frames itself, along with the cars’ wishbones and trailing arms, leaving individual vehicle builders to put together their own choice of drivetrain components.

In Joel Clevenot’s case, this meant a 3.0-litre Peugeot V6, as used in the Pininfarina-styled 406 Coupe. The 24-valve engine is famous for producing lots of power but not much torque, so this one has modified heads, cams and management, as well as an individual throttle body for each cylinder rather than the original plenum chamber. These mods, put in place by France’s engine-building guru Vincent Foucart (he of the F1 McLaren-engined off-road racer), give it between 285 and 290bhp – all of which is delivered smoothly from within the guts of the rev band.

An unusual transmission set-up sees the mid-mounted engine driving a six-speed gearbox mounted within the front axle. This is in fact an integral unit also containing the front diff and transfer case – meaning drive to the rear diff is fed all the way up the length of the car from its engine, then all the way back again. It sounds inefficient, but this design makes for excellent weight distribution and is far lighter than using separate components.

From the diffs, both of which are limited-slip, power is sent to all four wheels via BMW inner

Above: The cabin is simply gorgeous in its fitness-for-purpose Below: Spaceframe and suspension components are made by Fouquet; builders choose their own drivetrain

and Peugeot outer CV joints. Braking is by Peugeot 504 discs all-round, with 205 GTi calipers on the front and, to provide a proper cable-operated handbrake, Citroën BX units on the rear. ‘Joel built the car picking the bits that he wanted to use,’ says Dave. ‘So many people stick with all the parts off one car, which isn’t necessarily the best, whereas Joel’s picked the ultimate from every car and put it together.’

The same is true elsewhere in the vehicle – its steering rack and front uprights are from a Citroën C35, while the cooling system is based on a rear-mounted radiator and fans from a Renault Master. But when it comes to the suspension, which is of course one of the most critical parts of any off-roader, it’s specialist all the way.

Here, Fouquet’s front wishbones and rear trailing arms are operated by bespoke Öhlins units, one at each corner at the front and two apiece aft. Springs and remote-reservoir shocks were built to exactly the specification the vehicle required: ‘When he built it, all Joel did was ring Öhlins up and say “I want shock absorber and suspension units for this car.” They contacted Fouquet, did all the design and supplied them – all he had to do then was bolt them on.’ The units provide no less than 27 clicks of bump adjustment and 51 of rebound: ‘setting them up, I understand, is quite a black art.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, with so much opportunity to get it exactly right, there’s also a lot of potential for getting it wrong. And Dave confesses that when he first drove the Fouquet, he couldn’t get on with it. ‘I’m sure that once you know the car, the way they were set is very good, but for me it was too nervous. So I spoke to Fabrice Rivet in France, and he came and reset them for me. It’s a lot easier to drive now, though it’s more wallowy than it was before – I would like to stiffen it up very slightly, but on the whole it’s easier to learn. And I’ve got a big learning curve to go through, having driven live-axle vehicles before.’

To hear a reigning class champion talking about being on a learning curve seems peculiar, but experiencing the two vehicles at speed makes it clear just how very different they are. The Range Rover is armed with a 5.0-litre TVR engine prepared by John Eales and putting out well over 300bhp, as well as a whole host of choice components – yet it still feels like a blunt instrument in comparison to the Fouquet. Anti-roll bars and comp-spec damping notwithstanding, it’s nervous over rough ground and ponderous through corners – this is still an immensely talented off-road racer, but the two cars are simply not in the same league.

Strapped into the Fouquet, you’re almost sitting on the ground. The view’s nothing like as good as you get from up in the Range Rover, but it passes a lot more quickly. Blat-blatting through the gears, it leaps forward in eager response to every prod of the throttle, power snapping instantly forth from the snarling V6. There’s no flapping from the suspension, no time spent waiting for the engine to drag itself up on the cam, just a relentless wall of forward urge. Our test drive probably only reached about three-quarters of race speed, but the power available from anywhere in the engine’s rev band is remarkable – and despite some evidence of a tendency to resist turning in at high speed over loose ground, which suggested further adjustments to the suspension would indeed be necessary to get the best out of the car, the Fouquet can take corners at the sort of pace that would have a ‘traditional’ off-road racer on its roof at the slightest sniff of a rut.

With such a shattering turn of speed, the Fouquet is more at home with the fast, open terrain of French events than the extremely heavy going you tend to find in Britain. That’s why you won’t see it in action over here – unless, Dave told us, an event like the Salisbury Plain incarnation of the old Southern Hillrally were to crop back up. But there’s a reason why that group of Brits keep going back to France for their racing – and when you see this vehicle, you can see why they would want to go there for their cars, too.