Ivory Coast
CONVERSATION after the Sanremo Rally seemed to centre not on the World Championship title duel between Stig Blomqvist and Markku Alen, but on the remarkable way in which An Vatanen and Terry Harryman had driven one of Peugeot's four-wheel-drive cars to its second major victory, trouncing both the Audis and the Lancias.
The new car had twice made an appearance, and had twice got among...
Winning margins of the order of 13 minutes are normally associated only with endurance rallies such as the Safari, or, in Europe, only with something as rough and demanding as the Acropolis. Those based on comparatively short and smooth special stages — as the majority in Europe are — usually produce results in which the leaders are separated by mere seconds. It is all the more praiseworthy,...
BRIDGING TROUBLED WATERS
IT WAS A NORMAL FOREST HAZARD, A BROW
concealing a right-hand bend into a concrete bridge with parapets. The chassis leg on the driver's side hit the parapet and the Escort stopped dead from about 60mph. Terry Harryman got out quickly and ran back to stop the next cars. Malcolm climbed out through the windscreen and saw that his pride and joy was on fire. He grabbed a...
Easter in Kenya means Safari-time. The East African Safari Rally; the name itself chills spines as you imagine man and machine pitting skills against the ragged car-eating terrains of Tanzania and Kenya or the precipitous escarpments of the mighty mountain Kilimanjaro. All very romantic really, but in fact the myths that surround this great event are slowly being unravelled. To sum it up, the one...
French national pride has been well served by Grand Prix racing in the past ten years, Elf Petroleum, Matra, Renault, Ligier and Michelin having risen to the top of their field and brought with them a star-studded list of drivers of the calibre of Cevert, Beltoise, Prost, Arnoux, Laffite and Tambay. On the other hand the Gallic fortune's in rallying have waned. Nothing has equalled the victories...
RALLY REVIEW Cyprus Rally
'FOP-HEAVY, cluttered by coefficients, and with so many qualifying events that they frequently overlap, the European Rally Championship never seems to attract attention until about hallway through the year, when two or three drivers have emerged as potential winners of the series. Only then are efforts intensified, and the policy of some teams appears to be to tick over...
WHILE Citroens, Mercedes, Peugeot and Saab were bathing in glorious East African mud, B.M.C., Ford and Rootes were wooing leprechauns in an attempt to win the Circuit of Ireland. This was the first time far some years that the British manufacturers had shown any real interest in what is after all a rather parochial event. B.M.C.'s interest extended as far as supplying a 1275 Cooper S for Paddy...
THE DATSUNS left a trail of broken axles all over Kenya but Shekhar Mehta, his Violet (above) on its fifth axle, survived to take his fifth win, ahead of Walter Röhrl's Opel Ascona 400 (below).
SAFARI first-timers rarely do well, but a most impressive first attempt performance was put up by Tony Pond and Terry Harryman who scored an excellent fourth place in their Datsun Silvia (above) even after...
1985 -- Vatanen's four-minute warning
Finn storms back from huge checkpoint penalty to win Monte for Peugeot
When you commit just about the most basic error a co-driver can make, you know it's going to haunt you forever. No surprise then, that when Motor Sport asked Terry Harryman if the 1985 Monte Carlo Rally is an event he is reminded of often, his reply was to the point: "Yep.”
Silence....
Another East African Safari has run its course, and this time Fords have apparently confounded their critics by not only winning the event outright but backing it up by taking the Manufacturers' Team Prize, the index of price/performance award, and having six of their cars in the twenty-one finishers. Another pointer to the extent of their success was that these were the only examples of British-...
