The Paris Dakar rally has a deserved reputation as the toughest rally event in the world. Porsche and Mercedes have both won it once, Mitsubishi have won it eight times… Peugeot and Citroen have also won. But it was a Range Rover that was the first to win the Paris Dakar in 1979.
 
Visionary creator of the Paris Dakar, Thierry Sabine, got lost in the Sahara but came away with the Big Idea for totally new kind of rally. The first event ran to very few rules, any car could enter, but as it captured public imaginations, so it captured publicity... and the attention of the manufacturers quickly followed. Few British drivers have done well - the exception being double London to Sydney winner Andrew Cowan, who finished second and competed many times. Most British privateers do well just to last the opening week.
 
There were no FIA regulations when the Dakar started… the regulations followed on, simply because when Sabine designed a modern-day equivalent of the Liege-Sofia-Liege there was nothing else like it.
 
The first ever timed rally to cross the Sahara Desert was the 1974 World Cup Rally, sponsored by the finance house, UDT, a follow-up from the original London to Mexico World Cup Rally of 1970. The '74 event with a route planned by Henry Liddon and Jim Gavin crossed the Sahara to southern Algeria and into Niger (past the Arlit uranium mine on the road to Agadez that was in the news when America wrongly suggested it supplied nuggets to Iraq), to Kano in Nigeria.
 
Shekha Mehta bent the valves of a little Lancia Fulvia, had them straightened by a village blacksmith, and set off on the return crossing of the Sahara to finish in Munich. The event was won by a Citroen DS build in a backgarden in Sydney by two of the nicest guys you could ever wish to rally against. In terms of penalty points, they beat the Peugeot 504 of Christine Dacremont by a month. Read the best-ever book written on any rally by seeking out a copy of "A Boot Full of Right Arms" by Evan Green. (a wonderful insight into rallying the Sahara).
 
Getting lost: Two famous cases of rally drivers getting lost - Stirling Moss denies he was just about to drink the contents of the battery when Jim Gavin finally found him after three days of searching, with a bust Mercedes 280, during the '74 World Cup Rally. Mark Thatcher the son of the Prime Minister had Algerian air force jets scrambled to search for him, actually he had done all the right things and stayed with the vehicle.
 
Founding a scene: The World Cup Rally of 2001 helped set a new scene, with the British governing body of motor-sport adopting similar rules for 1400cc-only cars for UK club rallying. John Banks and John Elphick, seen above, were among the pioneers taking part in the event that drove into the Sahara of Morocco and back to finish at Brooklands, with this Mazda. They are now planning to get the same car to Dakar.