Dacia/Prodrive innovation that is positively changing the Dakar Challenge

Dacia SandRiders will pilot an innovative new driver safety device in the team’s debut at the Dakar Rally.

The manufacturer will use ‘seat attenuators’ to absorb impacts over rough terrain when the car slides up and down on its suspension, helping to reduce drivers’ spinal compression, which has been common in recent years. I have suffered injuries.

Technical partner Prodrive has developed the damper system, which will run on all three Dacia entries driven by Pilot Nasser Al-AttiyahSébastien Loeb and Christina Gutierrez, ahead of their wider inclusion in the World Rally Raid Championship (WR2C) regulations from 2027.

Explaining the system, technical director Philip Dunabin said: “There have been a number of accidents in rally raids where the cars collided with too much force and this has caused a number of back injuries, particularly to co-drivers as well as the main drivers. To too.

“So Prodrive has worked on a system called a seat attenuator, so when the impact gets to a certain G level, the seat will then shake and be like a shock absorber system, so the seat is completely firmly fixed. Will not happen.

“In normal duty, the seat doesn’t move at all, but, when there’s a really big impact, the seat can move down and it absorbs the impact.

“This is a development that Prodrive worked on for this project, so at the moment, these are the only cars to run this system.

“The application… it will come into the Rally Raid rules for any new car from 2027. But it’s already here.”

The Dacia effort – which was helped by the support of Renault Group’s alpine racing arm – will include a number of technologies that can be transferred to the Romanian manufacturer’s road car models.

“Dacia is working on pigments and resins, in this case carbon fibre,” Dunabin told Motorsport.com during a recent visit to the Prodrive base.

“These are pigments whose purpose is to reduce infra-red absorption, the purpose of which is to keep temperatures down in cars. There have been applications for these in the context of pigment systems in road cars.

“They have also brought out very matte, IR reflecting paint which they will use in future road cars.

“We use it here in things like dashboards for less reflection, less glare from the windscreen.

“There are elements that are not in the car yet related to materials for the seats etc., which have come directly from the Dacia road cars and, of course, the work that the partnership is helping us do with sustainable fuels With Aramco.”