Today I want to explain what kind of rally the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge — the one I am working towards — actually is.
It is an endurance rally that crosses from Peking to Paris in period classic rally cars: roughly 14,000 km in 37 days.
The word rally apparently comes from the sense of gathering again.
Starting in Peking and returning to Paris, this event keeps a very rare competitive form that carries the tradition of rallying itself into the present.
The first Peking to Paris
The first event was held in 1907. Of the five cars that actually took part, four finished.
The winner is said to have left the line:“It is more or less impossible to make this route by motorcar.”That is how tough it was — an adventure beyond imagining.
The second running came a hundred years later, in 2007. After that it has been held every three years, most recently in 2019. You can watch that one on YouTube (search “peking to paris rally” and a great many videos come up).
It was originally to be held this year, 2022, but Covid made that impossible and it is now planned for next year. On top of Covid there is the Russia–Ukraine crisis, and both the organisers and the entrants are throwing everything at route changes and at solving the problems.
Points of interest
1. 14,000 km in 37 days — a rally on a scale unthinkable in modern motorsport
From Peking in China to Paris in France, over 14,000 km in total. Sometimes more than 600 km in a day, from China through Mongolia and the Middle East and back into Europe.
In Mongolia you run enormous grassland gravel whatever the weather; in Europe, beautiful winding roads and narrow tarmac lanes — all in one car.
Conditions that today’s WRC would cancel for weather are simply driven here. Partly you have to drive or you do not arrive, but there is a real spirit of challenge in organisers who allow it.
2. Classic cars that once set rallying alight, running alongside vintage cars that are now legends
The 2019 running had a large entry. Led by the Datsun 240Z that won the 1971 Safari Rally, there were Porsche 911 Targas, Mercedes-Benz 230SLs and other famous cars.
In the vintage class too: a Bentley 4½ Litre “Blower” (a Le Mans 24 Hours entrant), a Chevrolet Fangio Coupé, a Contal Mototri (one of the five cars from the very first event — a three-wheeler) and other now-legendary machines, back in active service.
3. What it means to take on the largest classic event in the world
It once had something of “testing the limits of the motorcar and of humanity”; today, as a classic event, the entrants who come from every country carry a spirit of enjoying the adventure as fully as possible. The feeling between crews is less rivalry than companionship.
If a car gets stuck, local spectators will help push it, and crews share information and parts. It is that kind of peaceable event.
Why this rally is special
The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge crosses a continent, which makes it very large indeed. Rallying has always suggested endurance, but with the pressures on modern motorsport — the environment, infrastructure, money — distances have been getting shorter.
Even the famous Paris–Dakar, after being cancelled in 2008 when international problems made safety impossible, moved to South America and the Middle East. It is now less an adventure than a rally raid.
Against that, a rally using essentially the same itinerary as a hundred years ago and holding on so strongly to the old image is rare. It is probably the largest rally in the world. In every respect I think it is an event where you feel the strong adventurous spirit and will of both organisers and entrants.
This is where motorsport began
This rally is a legend from the past brought whole into the present. What was originally intended to show the countries of the world the “future” of the twentieth century is now held to preserve the good old past that twenty-first-century motorsport has lost.
There are other motorsport events with a century behind them, but this one is unusual even among those.
Andthe element of taking on a dream is essential to why this rally still exists.That, I think, is where motorsport fundamentally began.
Every entrant has their own goal. Driving, taking part, enjoying it, suffering, laughing, competing, seeing the landscape, seeing a world they do not know, finishing — each of them takes on a different goal through the medium of a car with an engine in it.
That is the important thing motor racing originally had. This rally carries that origin into the present.
That was an introduction to the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, which is not much known in Japan, and to what makes it worth watching. I hope it has caught your interest.