Dakar Rally Team - TEAM REPSOL MITSUBISHI RALLIART : STEPHANE PETERHANSEL / JEAN-PAUL COTTRET
STEPHANE PETERHANSEL
Stephane Peterhansel was born in France in August 1965 and now lives at Montana in Switzerland with his girlfriend - rally driver and former Dakar motorcycle rider Andrea Mayer. Over the course of the last 16 years he has become the most successful individual in the history of the grueling Dakar Rally, amassing eight outright victories and a win in the car T1 category.
He made his debut in a motorcycle event in 1980 and took the first of his six Dakar wins on a Yamaha motorcycle in 1991. He repeated the feat in 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1998, before making the switch to competing on four-wheels. After several forays into ice racing, he made his Dakar debut in a car in 1999 and finished seventh overall.
The following season he finished as runner-up in Mega Special with a Mitsubishi engine and won the T1 category outright in 2001. Peterhansel finished first overall in the 2002 Rally of Tunisia and went on to give the Mitsubishi Pajero Evolution a winning debut in the 2002 UAE Desert Challenge. He repeated the feat in 2003, but eventually finished third in the Dakar after losing a potential victory on the penultimate stage in Egypt.
2004 was his most successful season to date in a car. Stephane won the Dakar Rally for the first time to follow Hubert Auriol into the history books as only the second driver ever to win the race on two and four wheels. He also finished first in the Tunisia and Morocco rallies and added to his growing list of achievements by winning the Dakar Rally for a second successive occasion with Mitsubishi in January 2005.
Stephane finished second overall in the 2005 Patagonia-Atacama Rally at the wheel of an MPR10 version of the Pajero* Evolution, but suffered cruel luck in both the Morocco and Baja Spain rallies, while well-placed for victory. He then crushed the opposition in the 2005 UAE Desert Challenge, winning the event for the third time in four years, and went on to finish fourth overall in the 2006 Dakar Rally after leading for several days.
He then clinched Mitsubishi's eighth victory in the Rally of Tunisia in April 2006 and was leading the Rally of Morocco in June before the team was withdrawn from the event. After taking part in both the Morocco test sessions with the new MPR13, Stephane tackled the 2006 UAE Desert Challenge as a final shakedown for the 2007 Dakar Rally.
Continuing his winning record, the Frenchman went on to collect his third Dakar success on four wheels in January 2007 before taking victory on July's Baja Espana, as well as on the UAE Desert Challenge which rounded off the year's FIA Cross-Country Rally World Cup.
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JEAN-PAUL COTTRET
Frenchman Jean-Paul Cottret was born in June 1963 and now lives with his wife Sandrine and two children Marine and Charlotte, near Auxerre. Between 1984 and 1992 he was actively involved in Cross-Country rallies as a member of various service crews, before making the switch to the co-drivers seat.
He participated in the 1992 Rally of Tunisia and finished ninth overall, ninth in Spain the following year and then took third overall in the 1994 Dakar Rally and clinched the T2 Cross-Country Rally World Cup title.
Numerous top class results followed in events such as Tunisia, the Australian Safari, Morocco and Egypt and he finished second overall with Stephane Peterhansel in the 2000 Paris-Dakar-Cairo Rally. The following season the pair won the T1 category, before joining the Mitsubishi team to take a series of outright wins in Tunisia, Dubai, Morocco and a maiden Dakar Rally triumph in January 2004.
Cottret repeated the outright success with Peterhansel by winning the Dakar Rally for the second time in January 2005 and finished second overall in the Patagonia-Atacama Rally.
After disappointments in Morocco and Spain, the pair gave the revised MPR12 version of the Pajero* Evolution a successful shakedown with a crushing win on the 2005 UAE Desert Challenge and went on to finish fourth on the 2006 Dakar after leading for several days. Prior to working on the development of the new MPR13, the pair clinched victory on the Rallye de Tunisie and took part in the Rallye du Maroc. In January 2007, he won the Dakar with Peterhansel for a third time before spearheading a Mitsubishi one-two on last summer's Baja Espana and navigating Peterhansel to a fourth success in the United Arab Emirates.
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