Sebastien Loeb Is the Icing on Peugeot Team's Cake for the 2016 Dakar Rally

While he was rallying, he also found time to become three-times winner of the Race of Champions, the automotive equivalent of the Champions League where the best drivers in the world race head to head with identical cars and on identical tracks.

More recently, he teamed up with Peugeot and went to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in Colorado, USA, where his 208 T16 car smashed the record by no less than one minute and a half with a time of 8:13.878.

That was happening in 2013. In 2014, Loeb took part in the World Touring Car Championship season driving for Citroen where he won two races and scored six podium finishes, while he was still getting used to the switch from rallying to on-track competitions. He managed to finish third overall, and is currently occupying the same position in the 2015 season.

You might also have seen him at the X Games in 2012, kicking poor Ken Block's ass.

Well, the fact of the matter is you'll be seeing him at the Dakar Rally come the 3rd of January 2016. The French driver is joining Peugeot's team of formidable names in an attempt to end MINI's domination of the event. With what we've seen on Peugeot's part in terms of special vehicles development, we wouldn't rule them out.

Loeb is joining equally famous names such as Carlos Sainz - two-time WRC champion and Dakar winner in 2010, "Mr. Dakar" Stéphane Peterhansel - 11-time Dakar winner, and Cyril Despres, the man who won the competition five times on a motorcycle.

Speaking about this new challenge, Loeb said: “The Dakar is completely different from the racing I’m doing at the moment. It will be very long, over two weeks, and you need to have the endurance to look after the driver and the car. It’s another approach to racing but I’ll discover that in January.”

That's exactly why the experience in these conditions that Cyril Despres has, for example, is much more important than his actual experience at the wheel of a car.

“What struck me most of all is how the Dakar car was a completely new experience: in the WRC I have been used to going round obstacles but with this car you can just drive straight over them, and it takes some time to have the confidence to believe it!”, the 41-year-old Loeb concluded.

The next Dakar Rally will begin on the 3rd of January next year and will feature a new route, since Peru decided to withdraw from next year's edition.