Sahara Challenge

Starting in Malaga, Spain on Monday 23 September and finishing in Estepona, Spain, on Saturday 5 October after 4500 difficult kilometres, the HERO/ERA 2024 Sahara Challenge reached its end with Badawi Trail Champions, Jorge Perez Companc and Jose Volta scoring  victory in their 1938 Chevrolet Coupe.  The Argentine crew finished 4:58s ahead of Aussie pair Tony Sutton and Andrew Lawson, also in a Chevy Coupe, and Peking to Paris Motor Challenge Veteran Raj Judge and his navigator Monu Singh in third in the 4.5-litre Bentley Bobtail.

The rally followed a loop around Morocco, travelling east to Fez, south to the dunes of Merzouga and then back around the Atlantic coast via Marrakech and Rabat, before finally ending in Estepona.  The crews had to deal with roads and tracks damaged in the recent ‘once in a decade’ rain that hit the country, almost unbelievable, as the rally was almost exclusively run in the hot sun that baked the landscape hard and dry.  The route was certainly a treacherous and rough one, with care needed to ensure reliability of the machines.  As well as the dust of the desert floor, there were the heights of the titanic Atlas Mountains to scale as well, over a route that resembled a mini-Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, with many of the crews using it as a practice for next year’s P2P.

Photos Will Broadhead

While this rally can only be won by a pre-war car, the competition for the overall win in the classic category was as hot as the desert sun, although for a large proportion of the event it looked as though it would be ice-cool Finns Heikki Julin and Heikki Saloheimo driving a diminutive Fiat 124 Spider.  But cruelly a snapped steering idler that failed just

as they pulled out of the final day main time control ended their rally after a superb performance over 12 days.  Their demise promoted Michael Rodel and Andrew Duerden into the lead in the white Mercedes W115 that had wafted along the route seemingly barely breaking a sweat.