The three Defenders that tackled this year’s Dakar Rally represented the first works entry on the gruelling rally raid from JLR or its predecessors.
But it wasn’t the first time that a manufacturer-owned Land Rover had competed – and Autocar was a key part of the story.
The Paris-Dakar Rally began in 1979, charting a roughly 6200-mile route between the capitals of France and Senegal, passing through Algeria, Niger and Mali. The event’s notoriety in the UK grew in 1982 when Mark Thatcher, the son of then prime minister Margaret, went missing for six days after crashing his Peugeot 504. But up to the year before that it was still, as Autocar phrased it, “a peculiarly French event”.
Nevertheless, it had intrigued Tony Howard, a former Autocar assistant editor, who in 1980 secured the use of a Range Rover provided by British Leyland and came within 400 miles of Dakar before the machine failed.
The following year Howard roped in Autocar’s technical editor, ex-Formula 1 driver John Miles, for another go in a BL-owned Range Rover. While the factory provided the car and some support, Howard had to raise much of the money for the effort, so it was never an official entry.
Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com
In his extensive report of the event in Autocar’s 21 March 1981 issue, Miles memorably described the rally as “a sort of relentless demonic punishment for vehicle and occupants, and certainly not what one imagines it is going to be like”.
Much like this year’s Defenders, the pair’s Mk1 Range Rover was essentially standard, save for strengthened suspension, an extra fuel tank, extra lights and a few other parts, as it joined 307 other vehicles – 179 of which were cars – for the start in Paris. Twenty days later, only 42 of those cars would reach Dakar within the time limit.
The French portion of the event comprised road sections and a few short special stages; the “real rally would start in Africa” after a 30-hour crossing of the Mediterranean. While the driving was tough, so was life on the road.
“Running your own show means living out the back of a dust-laden Range Rover for 20 days, except for the odd occasion when a hotel veranda can be hired,” explained Miles. “It can be a wearying business.”
After picking up what the organisers called ‘energy rations’, the pair would “get into the car and set off into perhaps 600km [373 miles] of desolate terrain encompassing flat desert, soft cloying sand, and rocky, bone-jarring tracks; usually all three.”
They led the ‘standard four-wheel-drive’ class early on, until “a quite unexpected 15-hour penalty crept into our results”. The crucial stages “for us and most competitors” proved the 335-mile section from Tit to Timeiaouine and the following 460-mile test to Gao. “The memory of these two stages will live with me forever,” wrote Miles.
Running down the order and in the dust of other cars due to the mysterious penalty, soon into the first of those two stages, “we were bucketing over a surface bordered and strewn with evil-looking black rocks, some football-sized, others like knives”. Two punctures used up their spares; a third meant changing a tyre. With most of the stage to go, they had no spares left.