Safari Rallyt; The lull before the storm?

In just under ten days time, the Kenya Airways East African Safari Classic will start from Mombasa on Kenya´s Indian Ocean coastline. Many classic rallies claim to re-capture the spirit and essence of the old event whose name they bear, but none does it so well as the Safari Classic. As the fifty-nine crews leave Mombasa early on Sunday morning, November 25th, they will be facing a true test of men and machines that differs in very few respects from that which the East African Safari competitors faced thirty-five years ago when the Safari Rally was in its hey-day and the cars that they are using today were new..

Some things have changed. There is a reduced endurance aspect in that each night sees the crews taking a halt in one of Kenya´s or Tanzania´s excellent hotels or game lodges. But the total competitive distance is thus spread over nine days rather then the traditional five days and nights so the cars still have a lot to do. And the roads used are not modern highways but the older, sometimes even neglected, by-ways that made the old Safari Rallies such a severe event. The pre-1975 cars that are eligible to compete have been able to avail themselves of technology that has developed in the intervening years especially in the matter of suspension components such as dampers. It is no coincidence that the first two times that the Safari Classic was run - in 2003 and 2005 - it was won by Rob Collinge in his Datsun 240Z. Collinge is a renowned expert on suspensions for off-road vehicles and that undoubtedly contributed to his double success.

The fact that there is such an event at all is due entirely to the enthusiasm of people like Mike Kirkland and Surinder Thatthi. When the original Safari Rally expired after celebrating its fiftieth birthday in 2002 under the strain of trying to get its unique format to conform with World Rally Championship regulations, they promptly decided to create a classic version. Mike Kirkland ran the 2003 and 2005 events and shifted the event from Nairobi to run out of his home base of Mombasa. For 2007, the event is being run by Surinder Thatthi and has attracted its biggest entry to date with a full house of fifty-nine cars taking the start.

The cars and their crews are as varied as the terrain that they will have to tackle during the event. There are drivers from as far afield as Australia, South Africa and the U.S.A while almost every country in Europe seems to have at least one representative. There are also, as with the old Safari, plenty of crews from Kenya and Tanzania who want to take on the challenge presented by a Safari Rally. There are two ex-World Champion drivers in the field with Björn Waldegård and Stig Blomqvist both in Historic Motorsport Ford Escort Mk 1s and a nine times Kenyan rally champion, Ian Duncan, behind the wheel of another Ford, this time a Mustang.

With Ford Escorts, Datsuns, Volvos and Porsches all having enviable reputations from the original Safari Rally, it is not surprising that the entry list contains many examples of these with well-know rallyists like Gerard Marcy, Frederic Dor, Geoff Fielding and Paul Eric-Jarry opting for Porsche 911s, Keith Callinan, Ian Freestone, Bo Axelsson, Alex Hack and Dave Kedward choosing Escorts, Bert Dolk, Kurt Vanderspinnen and Ian Swan with Volvos, and John Lloyd, Steve Perez, Graham Alexander, Jayant Shah, Roddy Sachs and Jonathan Savage in Datsuns. Among the less-familiar cars are Ford Capri Peranas (a 5.0 litre V8 version built in South Africa in the early 1970s) for Richard Martin-Hurst and Paul Darrouzet while David and Sarah Rayner have a Capri 2.6 fitted with the original V6. Mercedes are represented by Marzio Kravos and Günther Kronseder with 450SLCs while there are several Colt Lancers of the kind with which Joginder Singh won two Safari Rallies in the 1970s. Various Peugeots, Alfa Romeos, BMWs and Toyotas complete the line up while there is a lone British sports car, a Triumph GT6 entered by Quentin Mitchell and Russell Savage. They have the distinction of being the youngest crew in the event with a combined age on the start line of forty-three years.

The last two Safari Classics have been mainly dry but, in the run-up to the event this year, there has been a fair amount of rain in the Rift Valley and north-west Kenya. And the long-range weather forecast seems to suggest that climate change may not yet have finished delivering its message to the Kenyan hills. In which case, the third running of the Safari Classic may indeed be a classic though one hopes that it will not quite match those epic ancestors of 1963 and 1968 when on both occasions only seven cars got through the wet conditions to qualify as finishers.


» Pressrelease från Safarirallyt, www.eastafricansafarirally.com.

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