BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO THE WRC’S JEWEL
How African challenge will retake its place on world stage
When the expected 58 crews are flagged over the ramp in Nairobi on Thursday June 24 for the start of the Safari Rally it will have been 18 years, 11 months and 10 days since Colin McRae and Nicky Grist won the last Safari to count for the World championship back in July 2002.
Arguably motorsport’s roughest and toughest event should have returned to the top flight in 2020 only for the first wave of Covid-19 to put a stop to that.
But it’s back this year as round six of the World Rally Championship season, and while it won’t be like a Safari of old – the total competitive distance is 11 miles shorter than the entire leg one of 2002 – a true WRC icon is returning nevertheless.
Naivasha, 50 miles west of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, and the surrounding countryside of the Rift Valley are home to all-but one of the 18 stages (Nairobi hosts the opening superspecial) with a competitive distance of 198.05 miles in store.
Grist has had a look over the route and believes the current crop of WRC stars will like what they see. They just won’t get to discover a fraction of what he, McRae and the others experienced almost 19 years ago.
“It was actually my favourite rally in the whole of the World Rally Championship, only because of the lie of the land, the challenge it gave you, the animals, the people, it was all so different to anything else you did in the championship,” says Grist. “When it came back on the calendar I thought ‘that’s unusual’, it was too expensive before so why, in the era of the most expensive rally cars that have ever been used, is it back in the calendar? But when I saw the schedule, I understood why it’s possible because the mileage they are doing in a day would have been one section, let alone one day of competition back in the day. It’s so very different to what the Safari was but it’s in Kenya and it’s still the Safari Rally.”
As a big Safari fan, Grist refuses to “knock the event”, but freely accepts the world – and the WRC – has changed significantly since 2002 and a traditional Safari would have no place in the currentera World championship.
“It’s still the Safari but before it was a 5000-kilometre route over five days timed to the minute, going through the night, going flat-out on road sections to put some new tyres on and top up some fuel, to get to the next competitive section on time. Now it’s very much a watereddown Safari. While they will still have antelopes to a point and on the plains they’ll get some zebra, they’re not going to go to a place where they’ve got elephants or what have you. There won’t be team helicopters to warn you there are wild animals, vehicles coming, people walking in the road. Now it’s very much on closed roads, no vehicles, no people, maybe the odd animal, but it’s all
15-20 kilometre sections whereas before you could have 150 kilometres in one competitive section alone. It’s more compact and probably half the challenge.”
Grist won 21 rallies in the WRC and looks back to his trio of Safari successes with great fondness, despite the event’s arduous nature.
“It was the toughest rally in the world,” he says. “Half the time it was not just a question of having a car that could win but a driver that would keep his car in a good enough condition to get him through the event. It very much was a balanced approach, a sensible approach by the driver and co-driver to make sure the car stayed in one piece because the conditions would break it very easily no matter how strong the car was.
“You really did have to have a car that was as strong as it could be. You’d never make it strong enough that it would never break because you’d be driving a Chieftain tank at the fraction of the speed. There was always very much a balanced approach. Some of the roads they are using for the Safari were used a few weeks ago in the [African championship Equator Rally Kenya] so obviously they are going to be regraded and looked after. There was one section that became quite broken up with a lot of loose rocks but that would just be like a second passage on Rally Turkey, for example.
“While there are some river crossings it will probably be like something you’d find in Argentina and not coming at full speed, having to brake to almost nothing to drop down through a riverbank and all the rest of it, which is what we had to do.”
As well as Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Alister McRae were also in factory World Rally Cars when the last Safari took place in 2002, while privateers
Nigel Heath, John Lloyd and Ron Oakeley featured on the entry.
For 2021, Elfyn Evans and Gus Greensmith are the lone British driving representatives in their Toyota Yaris and Ford Fiesta WRC respectively.
“It’s going to be new for both of them,” says Grist. “But they won’t experience that same endurance, the sheer roughness and challenges that Kenya can throw at you and certainly not what it was. As tough as the conditions were, you had sections timed to the minute and obviously there was a clear, decisive winner. Everything has changed and for them it will be a new rally in the current format with a few rough sections mixed in and not the challenge we mastered all those years ago. I had wonderful times there and was lucky enough to win three of the latter Safari rallies.”
Nevertheless, Grist insists the latest incarnation of the Safari won’t be a walk in the park for Evans, Greensmith and their World Rally Championship rivals.
“There will be a lot of challenges for the guys. The surfaces are going to be different. They’re going to be learning the intricacies of black cotton soil when it appears randomly through the route. And if it rains this becomes like ice effectively.
“It’s something unique to Kenya in many ways. It’s a sandy-like surface that blends into the natural red murram soil that’s there. When you get this black cotton soil when it’s wet you’ve got to be careful. It’s like black top on Tarmac when liquid tar comes up above the road. It’s not easy.
“It will be more like a full-on sprint event with a bit of caution here and there, not the balanced approach like we had before.”
As well as the competitive element of the event, the Safaris of old were characterised by the never-ending testing that took place, which lasted for several months, as Grist recalls.
“The first time I ever went there I had a contract with Toyota and they just launched the 185 Celica so we went in the beginning of December to start testing the car. We had three weeks there then came home for Christmas, went straight back out in the New Year and, other than one week off, we stayed out there until the rally was done.”
Current WRC rules prevent testing outside Europe and the majority of drivers are scheduled to arrive the weekend before the action gets underway.
Previously, the Safari was treated as a standalone event with manufacturers establishing satellite operations based in Kenya tasked with essentially recouping the massive investment by winning the rally.
“Reconstructing the rally route, doing a high-speed test with the rally car and the helicopter, service vehicles allocated with service times, basically allowing us to put the car through an actual rally scenario on the actual rally roads is what we did back then,” Grist remembers.
“The route was 5000 kilometres then, you had 30 pacenote books, none of this two or three books that you have now. It’s was a vast area going from Nairobi to Mombasa, Nairobi to Eldoret up in the Cheringani mountains to the desert areas of Maralal and down through the Mount Kenya Safari Club and back down to Nairobi again so it was a whole different world. It’s just unfortunate these guys will only be seeing literally one very small area of that rally route.”
While there’s no disputing the 2021 Safari won’t be the fearsome challenge the event once was, newcomer Daniel Barritt, who will co-drive Japanese Takamoto Katsuta in a works Toyota Yaris WRC, can’t wait to experience what his rallying heroes mastered in a brand of car synonymous with the Safari thanks to the efforts of legends like Juha Kankkunen, Carlos Sainz and Bjorn Waldegard who, along with Ian Duncan, helped Toyota to seven Safari wins.
“It’s new to all the current generation but it reminds me of watching Colin and Richard on TV when I was a kid with the helicopters chasing them.
I’m imagining it to be like an Acropolistype rally but to sample it for ourselves will be unique.”
“It made great television and I was very disappointed when it dropped off the calendar,” Grist adds. “Seeing the car coming across a plain, dust billowing out the back, animals here, there and everywhere, maasai stood on rocks with spears, so completely different to everything else, but things you’d come across quite naturally because you covered such a vast area.”
Jean-Pierre Nicolas, who won the Safari in 1978, ran the Peugeot team Burns drove for in 2002 and
Harri Rovanpera – father of current Toyota star Kalle Rovanpera – finished second with that same year.
“The Safari has always been a real classic, a beautiful rally, very difficult,” says Grist. “It was always called the hardest rally and it was easy to see why. Now it’s different but I am sure it will still provide competitors with a unique and memorable event.”
“It will be a learning experince in 2021” Nicky Grist