SEAT Toledo Marathon and MANIWASPEED

Too late for Group B, too early for Dakar.

Oh, you don’t recall the SEAT Toledo Marathon? Neither had I until deep diving into Spanish racing liveries, which led to discovering this ‘Raid’ style long-distance European rally car — by SEAT, the Volkswagen Group-owned Spanish automaker.

This is not a rebodied version of the much more successful Peugeot 405 T16 Gran Raid, the Citroën ZX Rallye Raid, or anything else. It’s every cm a SEAT.

Because the actual Dakar is on right now, I thought it was about time to highlight a forgotten factory effort that almost took the world by storm.

As a refresher, the street legal SEAT Toledo (above) was a 5-door liftback sedan, based on the Volkswagen Golf / Jetta Mk2. 

In contrast, the Marathon is an entirely unique, tube frame racing car with a composite body on top. That it says ‘Toledo’ all over the livery is more marketing than truth — surely, a chunky desert raid car flying through the dunes is a step above the usual magazine ad spend touting practicality, affordability, and…?

Sorry, lost my train of thought while thinking about this desert raid car howling across a dry lake bed.

Howl? Yeah, this puppy is motivated by an Audi quattro-sourced turbocharged 5-cylinder engine.

Like I said: kind of Group B, but not.

Don’t believe some sources that claim it took SEAT as long as six years to develop the car — from what I have been able to gather, I think it’s closer to three at most, with 1992 making up the bulk of the work done on the Marathon, including 5,000 km of testing with driver Josep Maria Servià.

At an off-road track SEAT built for the purpose, next to its Martorell test facility. 

Two cars were built, and the Marathon competed in a limited number of events in 1993-1994 before SEAT shelved the project completely…in favour of creating a WRC challenger. 

Despite spending way too much time this trying to track down final classifications for the races it did compete in, to better understand which vehicles the Marathon was sharing podiums with, I haven’t yet discovered the surely old and decrepit HTML frame and table that contains rally raid results from 1993-1994.

I do know it ran against the Citroën ZX Rally Raid for at least one event. Drop a comment below if you have any leads, please…

In typical weird car fashion, one of the two cars was later modified with a PRV V6 engine for an attempted comeback, and is lost or destroyed. The other car  was retained by SEAT Históricos, and was recently refurbished back into competition-ready status in order to take part in historic rally raid events — in fact, it’s already the poster car for RallyClassic Africa 2024.

When the rest of the world rediscovers the special off-road SEAT Marathon this year and read others talking about it, remember who emailed it to you first. ;)

Chart translated via La Escuderia / SEAT Históricos

Additional sources

Motorpasion has an excellent article on the car full of original detail photos (Motorpasion); La Escuderia; Car and Driver (Spain)

Recent site improvements

New About page — with credits for supporting members. It’s a small but important way to show my gratitude for your support.

Coming soon — URL & Recommendations for signed in members that’s a mix of old school blogroll / links page.

Story continues for members below…