If you were a French kid growing up, you might have a cartoon map of the Paris–Dakar Rally route on your wall, whether it be a proper poster or you simply tore the front cover of Auto Loisirs off and hung it up.

Those maps were illustrated by Pascal Meslet, an artist who also worked for Super VW Magazine and Rod & Custom. On Friday, his brother Vincent announced his passing at the age of 69 at his home in Brittany, where he lived after retiring.

While Meslet covered anything vehicle-related, he is best known for his Volkswagen-centric art for editorials in Super VW. These included slice-of-life illustrations like people on the road or at public gatherings in Beetles and vans, Volkswagen-themed parodies of NASCAR and Le Mans, and hypotheticals like the Luftüberlegenheit (a paratrooper transport plane based a Volkswagen bus) and VW-themed spacecraft modeled after The Jetsons. He also drew for events such as the Reno Air Races.

In the ’80s, he was tasked by Auto Verde and its successor Auto Loisirs with drawing up maps of Africa with the route of each year’s Dakar Rally, along with art of participating vehicles. For example, the 1984 map included a procession of wind-up toy cars based on actual Dakar vehicles like the six-wheeled Jules II Proto.

Meslet joked in January that the Dakar map was his “annual geography homework”.

Featured image credit: Pascal Meslet