Fans loved Henry Favre’s Mitsubishi Delica when it ran this year’s Dakar Classic. Potential buyers, unfortunately, not so much. The inability to get any takers on “Truciolo” means Favre is in a financial hole that’ll only get deeper as he prepares for his third Classic come January.

“We both made sacrifices, performed somersaults, and spent nights here in the workshop to create this object of desire, at least until a few months ago. I put it up for sale and nobody gave a damn,” Favre quipped. “So this year, I can’t refinance the project by selling Truciolo. It was my choice to buy this car, it was my choice to race it in the desert and bring it back here without giving it a new future. It’s not a competitive car. Despite finishing second-to-last at Dakar, it’s really hard to sell.”

The Delica was, predictably, one of the slowest cars in the field. Favre and his friend-slash-navigator Alessandro Iacovelli built it using the money they got from selling the Mitsubishi Pajero with which they made their Dakar debut in 2025. The novelty of a minivan at the Classic quickly won hearts in the bivouac and following online, and doubly so because Favre wasn’t racing for results and was mostly there to have fun.

He put Truciolo up for sale in August, but people apparently don’t want a battle-tested rally minivan. This is an issue for Favre as he wanted to repeat what he did with the Pajero by using funds from selling the van to pay for the 2027 Dakar Classic.

“I have no use for it, but unfortunately they haven’t even offered me a trade,” he continued. “There actually are some interested parties, but when you tell them it’s not a van for going on vacation to the Canary Islands or Ibiza, let’s just say they hold back a bit. Truciolo is a racing van so he has a license plate, he has the registration, but he also has all these accessories for racing so no one gives a damn.

“I like it. I don’t mind keeping it here because I still have 420 square meters of free space here in the warehouse.”

So he’s broker than broke and has a retired minivan chilling in his workshop. What does he do? Sign up for Dakar anyway.

For his third Dakar, Favre plans to take part in an IVECO Eurocargo service truck. He hasn’t announced the other two occupants beyond them having the “beginnings of gray hair and back pain of 50-year-olds”), but all three of them are renting it out. Iacovelli won’t return as he focuses on running his mountain gear business.

“We’re going to document every single maintenance job in the race,” Favre proclaimed. “There are race cars that race, there are race trucks that race, but when the car stops, the truck stops and fixes it. One starts again, the other sarts again.”

Sure, it’s not competitive and the winning truck will likely be someone like the old Jan de Rooy DAFs, but who cares? During Janaury’s Classic, Favre was frank about how little he cared of the result since he was at the bottom of the leaderboard and was only there to tell stories and have fun.

Indeed, that remains his philosophy for 2027.

“It’s like a subscription to a multimedia video and audio platform where everything is grainy and blurry, but I promise to let you experience the Dakar—or, rather, Africa—as it should really be experienced and told,” he stated.

“No rankings, no pros, no stuff everyone tells you. Just a channel dedicated to a story. I’ll tell you about the Dakar in detail. I’ll tell you about every single grain of sand in my underwear and everything the others don’t tell you.”

Favre has launched a GoFundMe for donations. He’ll have some sponsorship to help out, but everything else will still be covered to the best of his ability.

Featured image credit: Aurélien Vialatte / ASO