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We’ve finally shipped our Porsche 911 Safari cars to Africa for the 2017 East African Safari Classic Rally. The biggest crane we’ve used to date spent a day here last week and loaded three 40-foot shipping containers loaded with cars and parts onto container trucks headed for Felixstowe, in Suffolk.
From Felixstowe, the containers will travel to Mombasa: a journey which is expected to take six weeks in total. The boxes should arrive in Kenya by the end of October, where we will unload them and move them out to our rally base at Vipingo Ridge just outside Mombasa.
“Safari led us to develop a system for maintaining large numbers of cars in remote locations, and this is what we now do wherever and whenever we travel on events,” says Richard. “We effectively run a myriad of individual teams, controlled and coordinated centrally.
“Each car has its own spares kit box – 6ft x 3ft x 3ft – in which there are enough parts and spares to do most of the rally. On top of these spares kits, we also have a mother ship in the form of a 40ft container that travels everywhere with us. Forty per cent of the container is an air-conditioned parts store, which is racked and loaded with military precision, leaving sixty per cent to hold than two hundred wheels and tyres and other large consumables and equipment.”
The mother ship was the first container to leave Wardington this week, closely followed by two more containers containing a vast array of parts and four cars in total. Some of the cars we are supporting on this year’s Safari Classic are already in Kenya and a few more cars will be flown from their bases to Africa. While we’re not running double-digit numbers of cars this year as on many previous events, we are likely to remain as the largest team on the rally. It makes things no less interesting to run with a smaller team this time around: the challenge will be just as extreme.
A reminder from Richard Tuthill
We are perhaps best known for our Safari Classic Rally participation and produced a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 2013 event. This is a very nice memory to have and can still be enjoyed on our Youtube channel at youtube.com/tuthillporsche – or watch it below. Contact us with any questions regarding Safari.
