Why does this desert weapon have a Peugeot 605 face?
The tires are trying to leave the bodywork.
The roof literally breathes.
We think we’ve seen that huge wang stateside on a Civic in an AutoZone parking lot.
And on the nose sits a E. Leclerc supermarket logo.
Naturally, we wanted to know who was allowed to sign checks. Turns out Bruno Gilles, one of the men behind the IPSO project, ran the E. Leclerc in Limoux.
The supermarket boss was also driving the thing.
We need to know what everybody else in Limoux was doing with their weekends.
He entered a race in his everyday Range Rover.
Yeah. Just decided this’ll do. We’re imagining that in French, so it sounds like a great idea.
He watched the professionals and figured he could give them a go.
He did.
Then he pushed harder and stuffed the Range Rover into an embankment.
We weren’t there for the swearing. But we like to imagine someone across the paddock thought he’d just ordered dinner.
As you’ll soon discover, Bruno won’t be kept from a dinner.
A sensible person might have taken up gardening.
Gilles sold the Range Rover and built a prototype with mechanically deranged friends, sourcing an early engine through the classifieds.
The program eventually gave us this yellow assault on proportion: tubular chassis, nearly four liters of V6 behind the occupants, four driven wheels, eight shocks, two fuel tanks.
Somewhere between answering a used-engine ad and preparing to hit the edge of the map without lifting, the supermarket guy’s hobby got substantially out of hand.
As promised, he remembered dinner.
A 1999 report describes fricassée and wine from Limoux traveling alongside the toolboxes and oil, ready to feed his friends after the stages.
Imagine unpacking that lot.
Spanners. Oil. Dinner. Wine.
Somebody’s got the bonnet up and Bruno wants to know if you’ve eaten.
The circle grew, and Pierre Lartigue joined the little outfit.
We came here to interrogate a wing and found a grocer who crashed his Range Rover, built himself a racing problem, and brought provisions.
Look at those headlights again.
Somewhere behind that ridiculous face is a man who wants to beat the factory teams and make sure everybody eats.
We’d walk past a considerable amount of expensive carbon fiber to pull up a chair with him.
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