Very funny (although the headline was slightly weakened by my not knowing what a HiLux was).
The text of the stor is too funny to cut it down to just a ticker headline, but obviously needs to be longer.
French forces were in the news recently dragging Gbagbo out of his compund in the Ivory Coast, so you might try working that in somewhere. Have the spokesman petulant about how France was just starting to be taken seriously by the world media after so many years of jokes about eating cheese or surrendering to monkeys. Gbagbo was "humiliatingly slapped" by a soldier, according to some articles, so there might be a comedy angle in there.
Was it french or italian tanks that I used to hear jokes about having one forward gear and five reverse? The spokesman could try to defend that as a simple mixup at the renault factory.