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The 2012 London to Cape Town Rally started yesterday. First gathering was midday at Brooklands for driver briefing, scrutineering, and to collect the Yellowbrick GPS trackers that they will use for the entire rally.
The rain started falling at noon and hadn’t stopped by the time I abandoned Brooklands and headed for the official start line at the Houses of Parliament. I briefly caught Francis’ eye as his Hi-Lux crossed the start line and headed for Kent towards the first stages of this epic event.
Looking at the cars lined up to start was interesting. There are three Porsches: Joost and Jacques in car 45 (car built by us), Hayden and Alastair in car 35 (car built by WEVO) and car number 6: Tomas Prenosil and Lukas Cutler in a 964 Carrera 4, quite an interesting thing. Here’s the report from the rally organisers on Day 1:
A hectic start to the rally tonight has produced a few surprises.The results at Dover highlight strong performances for the smaller cars in the event, with Owen Turner and Matt Fowle in their 1600cc MG ZR emerging from wet, muddy and slippery lanes on the North Downs of Kent plus two off-road forest sections as overall rally leaders. They now cross to France with a grip of over five minutes ahead of the field.
Second fastest car in the two forest sections was the Belgian Tuthill Porsche 911 of Joost Van Cauwenberge & Jacques Castelein, who then found the navigation from maps was enough to slip down the leader board.
Saddest news of the night was the demise of the Triumph 2.5 of Chris Butcher and Sean Moriarty who fell off the road breaking the steering against a tree stump. They were then bumped by Andy Actman’s Toyota who found nowhere else to go when another crew stopped on the track to check the Triumph crew. Without the required parts the Triumph had to be recovered by transporter. Actman’s Toyota has a few marks on the front bumper.
