A rally is a peculiar kind of automobile race. It can cover a few miles or a few thousand. The course can be confined to one city or spread out over several countries. Unforeseen obstacles can include bad weather, road washouts, rock slides–sometimes even wild animals. Speed is not what’s most important in a rally; accuracy and control are.
When plotting a course, rally officials decide on the exact amount of time it should take to cover the distance between two points. The car that comes closest to that time receives points.
Each car entered has two people, a driver and a navigator. The navigator is equipped with odometers, slide rules, and watches. He tries to time each leg of the rally. Often, however, almost all of the instruments are useless. Breakdowns occur, or a car gets stuck in the mud. Local people are recruited to help push the car to solid ground.
A typical race of this kind was the East African Safari of 1963. The course would make an ordinary race driver seek another line of work. The rally took four days and covered 3,100 miles. It began in Nairobi, Kenya, and went through Tanzania and Uganda. The course led around part of Lake Victoria, over to the Indian Ocean, and back to Nairobi. The cars passed such exotic places as Mbale, Kampala, Meru, and Dar es Salaam.
On April 11, 84 cars started the rally. In one car, a Peugot 404, were driver Nick Nowicki and navigator Paddy Cliff. They were the eventual winners.
About 250 miles from Nairobi, near Kakamega, all the cars had to get through a stretch of rain-soaked road that resembled a large mud puddle. Paddy Cliff got out of the car and began to bounce on the rear bumper. His weight gave the rear wheels enough traction so the car could reach the edge of the road and slither through the jam of cars.
The Peugot needed several pushes from spectators to get up Mount Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border. To be sure, Nowicki and Cliff had to pay each pusher a few coins, but it was well worth the cost.
In a rally all local speed laws must be obeyed. Nowicki and Cliff averaged 53 miles an hour on the Nandi Hills Escarpment, but at the Nakuru control point, which had much better roads, the local speed limit was 30 miles an hour. To go faster would have cost the team 100 points.
In midrace the course had to be changed. A 90-mile stretch of road had been washed out by heavy rains. On and on sped Nowicki and Cliff, through fog, through rain, around boulders. Near the Morogoro Crater they saw herds of wild game. A tire blew out when they were doing 65 miles an hour.
In one area the road was completely under water. There was no way to tell how deep it was. They found out the hard way. Nowicki slammed the car into first gear and pushed through. The Peugot slid and churned and finally made it to the other muddy side. At a different spot the same conditions were encountered. Nowicki edged the car into the water. He felt the floodwaters of the stream sweep the car sideways and immediately shifted into reverse gear. The car just made it to safety. Nowicki and Cliff found another place to ford the stream.
Uppermost in the minds of driver and navigator were hazards that they might not be able to evade. They knew that once a car going 70 miles an hour had been wrecked by smashing into a giant anteater!
Nowicki and Cliff beat their nearest rivals by 75 minutes. And they understood what Time magazine meant when it described the East African Safari: “If there were a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Automobiles, there would be no East African Safari.”
From The Giant Book of More Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Rally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_Seven#1963
Yeah, those drivers and navigators are a different breed.
ayup….
they’re a few cards shy of a full deck allright
WTF? How is the driver seeing anything?
side window and the teeny tiny gap under the hood
anyhoo…by rally standards they are crawling along…dude could probably drive that pace with his eyes closed
“Sometimes you just gotta feel the road, man.”
Turns out this was one of the two most brutal years for that rally. The other was 1968. For this race, out of the 84 cars that started, only seven finished. The teams got the nickname “The Unsinkable Seven.”
Also, it turns out that car that hit the ant eater was in that race and was being driven by the team in the lead up until that point. They were able to get the car back on the road, but it eventually crapped out a little later.