Claude and Bernard Marreau are the sons of Robert, a garage owner from Nanterre. In late 1967 the two brothers pooled their savings and set off on a world tour in a Renault 4. The journey was documented on 16 mm film as L'autre côté du temps, which won the amateur film prize at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. On returning, the brothers learned of a Renault sponsorship programme called Les Routes du monde and set their sights on the Cape Town to Algiers transcontinental record. In 1971, driving a Renault 12 Gordini and aided by Yvon Garin, they covered the 15,432 km in 8 days, 22 hours and 18 minutes at an average of 71.96 km/h, beating the previous record by three hours.
When Thierry Sabine unveiled the Paris-Dakar Rally concept in 1978, the Marreau brothers were among the very first entrants. They spent 700 hours preparing a Renault 4 with a Sinpar four-wheel-drive conversion, an R5 TS engine developing 80 hp and a top speed of 160 km/h, negotiating a 40 percent reduction in the entry fee to afford the start. On the 1979 desert stages, facing vastly more powerful Toyota, Range Rover and Volkswagen Iltis entries, the brothers used their deep knowledge of African tracks to find shortcuts invisible to rivals. They finished fifth overall and second among four-wheeled competitors, and Renault formalised a partnership with them.
At the 1980 Paris-Dakar the brothers refined their Renault 4, fitting a Renault 5 Alpine engine with Renault-Elf-Uniroyal backing, and finished third overall despite stopping to assist an unconscious motorcyclist and suffering seven punctures in a single stage. Their 1981 Renault 20 campaign, built at the Nanterre garage with a Renault 18 Turbo engine, a Trafic rear axle and an exhaust routed over the roof, ended in retirement near Timbuktu when the oil pump failed while they held a lead of more than two hours.
For 1982 the Marreaus built two identical Renault 20 Turbo 4x4 prototypes. They won the Paris-Dakar outright, delivering Renault its first victory in the event. The win confirmed the brothers as the pre-eminent specialists of desert rallying and cemented the Desert Foxes nickname with the French public. Over fifteen Paris-Dakar starts the brothers recorded one victory, one second place, one third place and accumulated six stage wins.
The Marreau brothers were active in major rally-raids from the 1970s through the 1990s, representing a self-funded, hands-on approach that contrasted with the factory teams that would come to dominate. Their 1982 Dakar victory with a self-prepared car, built in a family garage, remains one of the defining moments of the event's early romantic era. Claude Marreau's role as driver and the pair's encyclopaedic knowledge of the Saharan landscape gave them an advantage that raw horsepower could not overcome.