Land Rover Legends: Part 12
Dangerous and exhilarating, the Paris-dakar inspired professional drivers and adventurous amateurs alike, and for a decade the Range Rover was the vehicle of choice for many of them
Paris-dakar was dangerous and exciting – and for one glorious decade Range Rover was the winning car
THERE’S REALLY only one reason why vehicle manufacturers spend big money to participate in competitive motorsport, and that’s to create a positive impression among the buying public that hopefully leads to more sales. The Rover Company was never a particularly active supporter of any form of motorsport, although once the Land Rover came along the company did arrange off-road trials and other competitive events that were open to Land Rover owners. But this was hardly truly competitive motorsport aimed at increasing sales, given that it was preaching to the converted.
Following the launch of the Range Rover in 1970, the cars were selling faster than the company could build them. Indeed, as late as 1977 the Daily Telegraph wrote that buyers were waiting up to six months before taking delivery, and expressed its concern that customers were turning to alternatives to avoid the wait. With demand running so high, it’s easy to see why no one gave much thought to what the Range Rover might be capable of in the rallying and endurance racing worlds. True, the British Leyland Competitions Department had wanted to enter a team of Range Rovers in the 1970 London-mexico World Cup Rally, but the vehicle wasn’t ready in time. The idea didn’t die completely, though, and BL’S PR department hatched a plan to enter the Range Rover in the first UK Hill Rally, which was held in May 1971.
The company hedged its bets and the entry was made under the name of the Rover Owners Association, just in case the final results were not to the company’s liking! They need not have been concerned: Roger Crathorne and Vern Evans drove to outright victory in YVB 166H. Two Range Rovers participated again in the second Hill Rally that autumn, and this time they were entered under the BLMC name. Roger and Vern finished fourth overall and first in class. Sadly, the Hill Rally was not destined to become a regular calendar fixture and over the subsequent years the closest the Range
Rover came to serious motorsport was as a support vehicle for the BL Competitions Department teams.
Things began to change in the mid-1970s, when French rally drivers started to see the Range Rover’s potential as a vehicle ideally suited to that country’s unique style of rallye raid events, which often lasted weeks and required true 4x4 vehicles capable of sustained high speeds over multiple stages in difficult conditions, although if you were so inclined you could enter most of them in a truck, a 2WD vehicle or on a motorbike.
In January 1976 several Range Rovers were entered by their private owners in the inaugural Abidjan-nice rally, taking first and second places in their class. During the second running of this event one of the competitors, Frenchman Thierry Sabine, was lost for three days in the Sahara desert and concluded that it would be an excellent location for a rally of its own: the following year the famous (some might say infamous) Rallye Paris-dakar was born. Thierry Sabine ran the event personally until he was killed in a helicopter crash during the 1986 rally, at which point his father, Gilbert, took over the organisation.
The first Paris-dakar, known as the 1979 rally, actually started on Boxing Day 1978 and finished on January 14, 1979 at Dakar after some 10,000 km of tough, full-on driving through Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta, and Senegal. Thierry Sabine had coined the defining phrase for his new event: ‘A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind’. Motorcycles took the overall first, second and third places, but fourth overall and the first car home was the Range Rover of Alain Génestier, Joseph Terbiaut and Jean Lemordant.
Five more Range Rovers were also among the finishers, together with two Land Rover-based teams. All were French entrants, but the Paris-dakar had captured the attention of the world’s media, to say nothing of some of the world’s major car manufacturers, and suddenly the Range Rover was a rally-winning superstar. It would be fair to say that the level of interest in the UK was considerably more muted than in France, where the Paris-dakar was almost a symbol of national pride. This did change for a while during the 1982 event when competitor Mark Thatcher, son of the UK’S Prime Minister, was famously lost in the Sahara for six days, but the Paris-dakar never quite caught the imagination of the British public, or indeed of Land Rover’s senior management.
The second Paris-dakar in 1980 was an even bigger event and saw the appearance of factory-supported teams for the first time, including VW, Yamaha and BMW. And among these automotive giants was British Leyland France, whose PR chief Humbert Carcel had the cunning plan to prepare a several-years-old Range Rover and offer it to two British journalists – Anne Hope, editor of Vehicle Engineer, and Tony Howard, news editor of Autocar magazine. Theirs was one of the 20 Range Rover and six Land Rover entrants among the 116 cars that set off from Paris.
Many of the Range Rovers were already showing the first indications of the serious modifications that would later define the ultimate Paris-dakar Range Rovers and the highest-placed Range Rover, which came fifth in the car category crewed by Christophe Neveu and Rémy Bourgoin, was a pick-up. The UK team did not finish, following the failure of a bodged repair to the steering drop arm ball joint carried out by a local mechanic, but having tasted his first Paris-dakar, Tony Howard was keen to do another.
For the third rally in 1981, Tony teamed with John Miles, a colleague at Autocar and F1 driver for Lotus in 1969-1970. David Boole, BL Car’s director of product and international affairs, put together a package that included TRW 425R, a Range Rover that had begun life in 1977 as a factory-owned development vehicle. A budget was found from somewhere, and the vehicle was delivered to Janspeed Engineering in Salisbury where SU carbs were fitted together with a warmer camshaft and porting improvements, plus many other alterations. After a tough three weeks Tony and John became the first all-british team to finish the Paris-dakar, coming home in 27th place.
Seven other Range Rover entrants were above them on the scorecard, including rally veterans René Metge and Bernard Giroux. The reality was that BL France had continued its support of the event and had in fact been funding the team that included the winning vehicle of Metge and Giroux, including preparation of the vehicles by Tom Walkinshaw Racing, BL Motorsport at Abingdon and specialists Schuler Presses in the UK.
Tony Howard entered for the third time in 1983 and was able to secure support once again directly from Land Rover, with new axles and transmission being fitted to TRW 425R at Solihull, while the venerable veteran was resprayed white and fitted with a black fibreglass bonnet. Sponsorship was found from Dairy Crest who were at the time pursuing a campaign to promote English cheese in France, which is why
Tony’s Range Rover was bedecked with the ‘Mr Cheese’ character and the ‘Fromages Anglais’ logo. After interviewing half a dozen candidates, Tony enlisted French TV journalist Yves Géniès as his co-pilot, but their plans came to an early end in southern Algeria when an oil ring started to break up, and they decided to limp back to Paris rather than continue further into the desert.
BL France, now renamed Austin Rover France, had continued its support of local French teams, and soon put its corporate shoulder behind the French Halt’up! company, with considerable success. Periodically, Land Rover would consider whether it wanted to commit whole-heartedly to the creation of a fully-funded works competition team, but on each occasion pulled back from doing so. In the early 1980s Land Rover’s reluctance to commit to the Paris-dakar was probably influenced by its decision to support the Camel Trophy, which was likely to be more beneficial for the company in terms of publicity and association, and, of course, it was the Range Rover that was the vehicle provided to the first two Camel Trophy events in 1981 and 1982.
The Paris-dakar continued to grow dramatically each year, and by the mid-1980s there were considerably more 4x4 vehicles to challenge Land Rover on the event, with entries from Daihatsu, Lada, Mercedes and Toyota. It was also the beginning of massive investment by the major manufacturers in vehicle preparation, teams and support infrastructure, with companies like Porsche, Peugeot and Mitsubishi entering the fray. Nevertheless, the privateer Range Rover entries continued to do well, achieving third and fourth places in 1983, second place in 1984, and sixth in 1985.
John Faulkner, a young Land Rover engineer and passionate motorsport competitor in his spare time, proposed an idea to his boss Bill Morris that the company should build on the Range Rover successes in the ParisDakar by providing direct factory support to the Halt’up! team. Bill took the idea to managing director Tony Gilroy and it was agreed that John would take on a new role to support Halt’up! in its endeavours to continue to make the Range Rover a Paris-dakar winner.
John takes up the story: “I started the new job in June 1986 and after spending time with the Halt’up! team I concluded that there were a number of key priorities that needed to be addressed. First among them was the attempt to tune the engine, which was being pursued via a French developer who wanted to supercharge the Rover V8. I thought this was the wrong way to go for desert driving and decided to speak with engine developer John Eales in the UK, and together we created a massively-enhanced motor with what I think was the first sequential fuel injection system on the Rover V8.
“John Eales did a fantastic job, but we also had to invest a lot of time and effort in things like improvements to the suspension components, the transfer box and changing the heat treatment on the halfshafts to prevent breakages. We conducted a lot of testing at Château Lastours in southwest France. It was all pretty full-on and I have to say that sometimes it seemed highly appropriate to me that there was a mental hospital on the site!”
Part of the problem was that Land Rover had created only a nominal budget for the work, and John was working pretty much on his own and relying on the goodwill and support of his colleagues back at Solihull. “Help came from all sorts of directions,” remembers John. “The lady who ran our company Technical Library took a great deal of interest in what I was doing, and helped get me what I needed. She would issue news bulletins on our progress and distribute them around the shop floor, although I don’t think management took much interest!
“Land Rover had created a budget of only £50k which really wasn’t very much at all,” says John. “I remember speaking with Jean Todt, who was head of the Peugeot factory team, and he told me he had a budget of £6 million! It was not really surprising that Peugeot would go on to win the
1987 rally with a 205 T16 piloted by Finnish rally driver Ari Vatanen and co-driver Bernard Giroux.”
Patrick Zaniroli with co-driver Lopes achieved second place in a Range Rover prepared by Halt’up! and Range Rovers also finished seventh and tenth. John Faulkner believes the Range Rover could have become the ultimate endurance rally vehicle: “The reality is that the Range Rover had performed extraordinarily well on the Paris-dakar, which at the time was undoubtedly the harshest competitive motor event in the world for 4x4 vehicles. That it performed so well straight out of the box is remarkable, and that it was still capable of podium finishes nearly ten years later speaks volumes for the development work that went into creating the Paris-dakar vehicles. The reality, though, was that no-one at the top of Land Rover seemed to think this mattered, and the company never really committed to the project at scale.”
John remained at Land Rover until 2007, when he left to head-up a business specialising in automotive interior components. Since 2014 he has been managing director of West Midlands-based Millenium Manufacturing Group, which specialises in pressed metal components.
Jonathan Ward was another young Land Rover engineer who was an amateur racing driver with a lifelong passion for motorsport. As a good friend of John Faulkner, Jon was well- positioned to approach their mutual boss, Bill Morris, to see if he might be considered for the Paris-dakar role once John’s tenure was up. “Bill’s response was typically direct,” recalls Jon. “Since I spoke French, understood motorsport engineering and driving and knew how the company ticked, Bill handed me the reins in September 1987.
“There was a brief handover from John to me, and the first thing I did was a road trip with our marketing manager, Tom O’connor, to visit the Halt’up! team in Paris. We met Pascal Vigneron and Benoist Rivrin and their team, and it quickly became clear that Halt’up! had already decided on the suspension set-up and the new design for the fibreglass and Kevlar body panels for their bespoke Range Rovers. That was not really a surprise given that the 1988 rally would be starting on New Year’s Eve, which was only three months away!
“I quickly had to decide how I could add the greatest value to the Halt’up! team. There was a lot of sponsorship money coming from the likes of Camel and Elf, but Land Rover was offering something different – the expertise and knowledge of its engineering team – and I had to work out how I could bring that to bear in the most efficient and effective way. The 4.2 engines were already sorted and would be coming from JE Motors but it seemed to me that work would be needed to optimise the gearbox and diff ratios, and the steering
“It was all a bit informal, depended on goodwill and the old-boy network, but we still got things done”
response and suspension set-ups. And there really wasn’t that much time.
“One immediate issue that Tom and I had to handle with a degree of diplomacy was the replacement body design, which bore very little resemblance to a production Range Rover and had even lost many of the styling cues that were at the heart of the Range Rover DNA. Tom and I had to insist on some changes, such as the reinstatement of the castellations on the bonnet corners, and some revisions to the grille design, so that the Halt’up! cars looked more like Range Rovers.
“In many ways I felt I was applying for the first time all the theory I had learned during the work for my mechanical engineering degree thesis on vehicle handling, and aligning this with the practical experience I had gained at Land Rover and during my time as racing mechanic for national champion Keith Ashby.
“Land Rover hadn’t created a meaningful budget for their support of Halt’up! and this meant there were definite challenges to be faced in getting things done. The whole collaboration really relied on building relationships with the Halt’up! team, and then being able to persuade my colleagues back at Solihull to help out. It was all a bit informal and depended on goodwill and the old-boy network, but that was often the case in the company in those days, but we still got things done!
“I found myself working 80-hour weeks, often testing late at night on the track at Gaydon, but there was always so much to be done and so little time. I was never happy with the steering and felt we needed something heavier but with more urgency and feedback, and in the end I approached Adwest and they agreed to come up with a revised steering box. I also felt that we needed a new gear cluster to cope with the increases in power and torque, and Xtrac were able to build ten gearboxes for me in double-quick time.
“Very soon we were into testing at Château Lastours before heading for final testing in Tunisia, and the decision was taken that I would be a riding engineer during the testing phase, which meant I could develop my own sense of what was contributing to the handling. This allowed for much more useful discussions with the drivers around what we could do to improve things or deal with specific issues. This was when I was really able to prove my worth, because it was quickly apparent that something was very wrong – driver Patrick Tambay had a real crisis of confidence during the high-speed off-road testing. And then I had a light bulb moment when it dawned on me that the castor angle had not been corrected for the altered and lengthened suspension. Only the factory could intercept production and manufacture a modified component on the fly, and we managed to get this done and sort out the problem. In the event, Patrick Tambay and Dominique Lemoyne came home in third place with Malcolm Smith and Alain Fieuw in fourth, so we were all pleased with the results.”
After the event was over, Jon Ward spent considerable time writing a report on his year with the Paris-dakar. “It was very important to me that I could demonstrate that I had put my heart and soul into the job and had achieved something that could be sustained into the future by using this management document to develop a business plan. I also felt there was a unique opportunity for the company to create a new profit centre that would provide specialist
support and competition parts to vehicle preparers and private owners. I also recommended that the company homologate the Range Rover to FISA Group T1.”
In the event, though, no-one succeeded John Faulkner and Jon Ward in the Paris-dakar liaison role. “It became clear to me that Land Rover was never going to have a meaningful motorsport programme,” recalls Jon, “because it really didn’t need one to help sell its vehicles and because there wasn’t really anyone in senior management that believed in the benefits that would accrue from motorsports. I spent another five years with the company, in marketing, and then left to join Castrol as International Motorsport Marketing Manager.” Jon then had a varied international career including time in Argentina for Castrol, and was Commercial Director at Aston Martin Racing and later filled the same role for the UK Hydrographic Office.
“When I look back on that period it’s fascinating to see what two young, enthusiastic and passionate engineers could achieve without much of a budget,” says John Faulkner. Jon Ward agrees, and is full of praise for his old boss Bill Morris. “Bill gave us free rein,” he says. “He was very supportive, and he let us fly on our own and relied on us to be able to get the things done that needed doing, with the help and support of our colleagues. That was the Land Rover way!”
Triggered by Jon Ward’s homologation recommendation, Land Rover underwent another of its periodic reconsiderations regarding the extent of its direct involvement in rallying, and in January 1989 work began on a prototype vehicle which was intended to determine whether a Range Rover rally vehicle designed to meet the Group T1 regulations could be competitive. A standard RHD four-door with manual transmission was used as the basis for the development and fitted with a tuned JE Motors 3.9-litre V8. The body was left to production standard at this stage, although an internal roll-cage was fitted together with a huge fuel tank and a Torsen LSD in the rear axle. “I concluded the homologation following a personal visit to the FIA at Place de La Concorde, Paris, scraping in just in time for the 1990 Paris-dakar,” says Jon Ward. It all looked very promising.
But once again Land Rover decided not to go ahead. The reasons were threefold and compelling: the Range Rover was just about to be pushed further upmarket where rally results were largely irrelevant to sales success. The company was just about to launch the new Discovery at the end of 1989 and needed to focus on ensuring it succeeded in the new leisure and lifestyle market and, finally, the Camel Trophy really provided all that Land Rover needed in terms of competition activity and publicity. It was the last time the Range Rover would be officially considered by its makers for any kind of competitive motorsport.
And as for the Paris-dakar, it continued to grow but a series of accidents that injured and killed participants and locals alike began to tarnish the event’s reputation, as did its association by some observers with exploitation and postcolonial arrogance, and a sense that it did not bring any value to the people of the countries it traversed. In 1991, French singer/songwriter Renaud even released a track about the rally on one of his albums, entitled ‘Cinq cent connards sur la ligne de départ’. I’ll leave you to Google the English translation, LRM is a family magazine, after all!
Worsening international security finally made the rally’s traditional route through the Sahara untenable, and today the event is known simply as The Dakar and takes place in South America. That it is a dangerous event is undeniable: since the first event, 28 competitors have been killed and over 40 staff, guests, journalists and spectators have also lost their lives, among them four children.
The last time you’ll find a Range Rover, or any Land Rover product for that matter, with a top-three podium finish is in 1988, the year Jon Ward was working with Halt’up! to perfect their heavily-modified Range Rovers. How different it might have been had Land Rover been able to allocate a sensible budget to match the enthusiasm of its engineers and the commitment of its partners in France.
Since then, Mitsubishi has dominated the winners list with its Pajero, while over the past ten years VW’S Race Touareg and the Mini All4 Racing have both performed well, as has the Toyota Hi-lux. All are purpose-built variants designed to do little more than win the Dakar.
Whether the Paris-dakar was ever an important event for Land Rover to succeed in, other than in terms of its impact on vehicle sales in France, is open to debate, but clearly the event in its current format holds no attractions for JLR. Whether this might change once the company has a new utility vehicle and is trying to re-establish itself in markets that value dependability, reliability, durability and fixability more than anything else, remains to be seen.