STORY OF EPIC DRIVE

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31409, 30 June 1967, Page 9

STORY OF EPIC DRIVE

TZEN CHAMBERS and Eric Jackson drove a Ford Corsair 2000 E from Cape Town to Southampton to challenge the British Union Castle Line’s claim that after air travel, their steamship service was the fastest way of getting from South Africa to England. Chambers and Jackson arrived in Southamp- ' ton at 6.4 a.m. on May 22, one hour before the mailship Windsor Castle, after leaving Cape Town at 4 p.m. on May 110. The race was agreed to be a draw. The two marathon veterans :—they have previously driven a Cortina from London to :Cape Town and a Corsair round the world—made the run in 11 days, 15 hours and 4 minutes, the fastest time i yet. Here is a description of I the journey, written by Chambers and Jackson: On the Union Castle boat out to Cape Town they gave us so much to eat and drink and kept us up so late playing cards that more suspicious minds might have suspected a plot. But if we were slightly out of shape the send-off thousands of people imCape Town gave us boosted our spirits. And when we got towards Nairobi we got another boost to our morale when Peter j Hughes, a rally driver, drove out to escort us for 500 miles. But those were the best I times. The bad times will linger just as long. There was the dreadful stretch in Tanzania when we got 17 punctures one after another. Eventually we just ran out of tyres. It was night, it was suffocatingly hot, and there was no option but to walk back 12 miles to j a village and hope to find somebody with some spare rubber. JUNGLE WALK

Eric volunteered, and for every mile of that walk he imagined there was a lion behind every bush. Eventually he knocked up somebody who had supplies and was driven back trumphant. He felt

still more triumphant when the local announced that he wouldn’t have done that walk for any amount of money. The sheer physical effort of changing the tyres in that heat left us exhausted. When we had finished we lay down in the road for five minutes before we could move. There was the time when we were motoring along nicely when suddenly, instead of a road, there was a 30 yard long pit about 6ft deep and more than half-filled with water.

The car went in and stopped. When we got out the water was up to our waists. There the car could have stuck for ever if we hadn’t been able to persuade some natives to swap a long heave ho on some ropes for a share of our food and cigarette supplies.

We didn’t really get into an eating mood in the entire trip. Once a small tin of salmon each kept us going for three days. It was not much wonder we reached Southampton a stone lighter than when we left Cape Town. ELEPHANTS

We saw almost every sort of beast except lions and rhinoceros. But elephants were the only things which got in our way. Once we had to thread our way through a whole herd of them at about 20 m.p.h. It was rather like navigating through cows being driven along a country lane only these lads were about five times taller than the car, anj we were rather careful not to run over any of their toes because they might well have had some heavy objections.

The Congo was the most difficult country on our route. The roads were neglected and everywhere there were road blocks with armed soldiers. We must have spent six or eight hours just waiting at them while somebody slowly spelled out our permits to travel.

Often we had to report to the local military commander and all the while you got the feeling the troops were a bit trigger-happy. Quite often one of them would fire a burst from an automatic rifle at a monkey, just to keep his eye in. In the Congo there were so many ghost towns, run-down and virtually deserted, that we were never quite sure whether we should be able to get petrol ahead. We could carry 49 gallons in the car but that was not a great consolation if you didn’t know whether there would be a pump for the next 1000 miles. The Congo proved difficult to the last. At the border on the way out at Zongo, the frontier is a river two miles wide. Although we reached the embarkation point half an hour before it closed for the evening the ferry was on the other side of the river—and showAi no signs of returning.

Faced with the prospect of waiting there until morning, we hired a man’s dugout canoe and had him paddle us across to try to get the captain to take us over. Instead our arrival was greeted on the other side of the river at Bangui, in the Central African Republic, as a spot of illegal entry. We were slapped

under house arrest and our morning.

By the time we were freed we were 12 hours behind schedule. Union Castle sportingly allowed us to extend by about 500 miles the hop by air which we had planned to make over one short inaccessible piece of territory in Cameroon, so we were soon back on schedule.

FRONTIERS Moct frontier posts gave us no problems. Over the years we have developed a goodneighbour policy of leaping out of the car all smiles, shaking every hand in view, and handing round the cigarettes. It’s amazing how well it works.

This time we sophisticated the method a bit. We took a Polaroid camera, and if anyone looked like making trouble we took a quick picture of him and gave him the print. Soon he would be surrounded by admiring family and friends looking at the picture, and would wave us happily through. With the Sahara looming ahead we entered the most dangerous part of the whole trip: 1350 miles to be covered in 43 hours—faster than the run had been done before, according to the locals. They had tales about seven people and a guide who had died making the crossing recently. They also advised us not to drive at night. We didn’t have any alternatitve if we were to get back ahead of the boat, so we took it non-stop.

Luckily our navigation was good: in fact we never strayed more than about two miles off route on the entire trip. We had to dig ourselves out of soft sand a few times, but it was hard sand which was almost our undoing. We took a line of dunes about 60 m.p.h. where the going looked soft. They turned out to be as hard as concrete. The car “took off” about eight feet in the air and hammered into the ground with an impact that we thought must have pulled the engine out.

ROOF DENTED The roof was dented by all the kit on top, the windscreen was cracked and the steering was a mess. Wfe straightened the steering and within 10 minutes were on our way again.

The car ran sweetly all the way home. It had only one service, in Nairobi. We used 24 tyres and mended 37 punctures by the roadside. We changed the dynamo twice, had a battery which broke in half, and a damaged speedometer cable and petrol tank, but we hammered that car as we had never hammered one before.

Just near Southampton a police car signalled us to stop. An officer took our names and addresses and cautioned us that it was hardly possible to read our numberplate. We got out, wiped off a fairly large slice of the Sahara, and were allowed to go on.

If, in years to come, some geologist is puzzled by an analysis which appears to show an outcropping of the Atlas mountains on a Hampshire roadside, you can tell him we were there. . . .