Can a cheap, old Suzuki Jimny really go desert rallying?

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go, with a shovel and a shovel and… Look, rhyming isn’t my strong suit, and Disney’s dwarfs pre-dated the Tuareg Rallye by many decades, but the lyric dances along the dusty tracks of my head, eventually finding form in a tuneless whistle, gasped out between panted breaths. 

Images: John Wycherley

This feature was originally published in the May 2017 issue of Top Gear magazine

I’m dig-dig-dig-dig-digging. This isn’t much fun. I’m wearing triple-layer Nomex, my HANS device is rattling irritatingly around my neck, I can feel sweat forming a meniscus between bald head and helmet lining and I’m on my knees in a desert, desperately trying to shovel sand out from around the back wheel of a Suzuki Jimny – something else small, dwarfish, and industrious. But at least I’m not currently dangling upside down in my belts. Ten seconds before the beaching, a somersault from a dune top had been on the cards. 

And hell, if I hadn’t have got stuck I don’t think I could have claimed to have done the event justice. Go into the boundless Sahara and not get stuck? Clearly you’re not trying hard enough…  

The Tuareg Rallye is like the Dakar for those who don’t have Peugeot’s budget and aren’t called Stéphane Peterhansel. It’s a fearlessly amateur thing, seven days of belting about Morocco, on routes designed to be challenging, placing the emphasis on driving and navigation rather than money and speed. It was set up by a chap called Rainer Autenrieth 19 years ago. Until two years ago he was a fuel-cell engineer at Mercedes, now the rally is his full-time job. He runs it from the back of an ageing VW T4 camper van. You don’t need a rally licence, the hotels are an education, the camaraderie/piss-taking is huge, you’ll be far from wifi, and I guarantee you’ll have an adventure just getting here – just follow in my footsteps and drive the 555km from Marrakech at night. 

Now let me introduce you to John Cockburn. He still has a proper day job – driving race trucks for Peugeot on the Dakar and such like. But he, too, realised that normal people wanted to have a go at desert rallying, so a few years back he started buying Suzuki Jimnys and throwing rally components at them. Some of them even stuck. Ours, an eBay purchase, was £1,400, the secondhand seats were £180, the Old Man Emu suspension was £100 a corner, same for the BF Goodrich tyres. The cage was about £700, the running gear is standard. All told, about £4.5k of wobbly, topply investment. Or about half a damper on Peterhansel’s 3008 DKR.

The next morning we walk to the dunes behind the hotel where most of John’s Maxtraction team are sleeping in trucks. Wise decision. Apparently we’re lucky not to be in the Rose des Sables down the road. An engine swings gently as it dangles from a truck hook. Today for me is about learning; tomorrow I race stage four of the rally. 

“You need to get a taste for camel poo”. This, apparently, is the first lesson. Must be some sort of desert survival tip. John and I are surveying the Sahara from a vantage point atop a high dune. Sketches in the sand have revealed the importance of working out wind direction, we’ve shaded our eyes and tried to discern colour changes (a grey tinge is good), and seen just how difficult it is to establish depth perception, angle or terrain when you’re driving towards the sun, compared with driving away. Or is it the other way round? Either way, driving in sand is hard. Racing in sand is downright treacherous. And camel poo is your friend. “Camels aren’t stupid”, John continues, “they don’t want to walk in soft sand, so follow their poo.” 

Theory done, it’s time for the practical. ‘My’ Suzuki Jimny has a pair of shovels on the bonnet, and in the back some shagpile carpet and a scuba tank. I kid you not. I’ll need the aqualung if I bury the car really deep, the carpet so I can have a lie down after I’ve resurfaced. Actually, no. John claims shagpile carpet, laid face down on the sand, is a better solution to help free a stuck car than a sand ladder. And that an on-board compressor is a vastly expensive way of reinflating tyres, when a 300 bar scuba tank will do the job in a jiffy. 

I have a practice with both. A gadget extracts the valve core so you can drop tyre pressures from 25psi to 8psi for the dunes. I also learn the Moroccan tyre test: wallop the sidewall and watch for the wobble. The carcass shakes appropriately. 

Deemed safe, the Wych and I are told to go off and have a play in the desert. The Jimny is 12 years old, has 83,000 miles on the clock and will be off to the great scrapheap in the sky soon. John reckons they last three events before scrappage beckons. It is worryingly vague in almost every measurement. The gearlever is gloopy, there’s no power, the Old Man Emu suspension appears to be a statement of fact, it’s tall, short, narrow and deeply unstable. But at least the turning circle is tight – handy when you’re in something as restrictive as a desert. 

Then I clear Merzouga city limits and head off road. And you know what? My First Rally Car knows its stuff. It has a real appetite for dusty tracks, for rocky sections, for scrubland – a real can-do attitude. Trail-brake into corners and the back will arc round, the brief wheelbase and soft suspension can be used to adjust trajectory with barely any steering input. You can build a flow with it. This much fun with just 82bhp? Come to think of it, power and handling feel well matched, which probably tells you most of what you need to know: anything above 60mph is worrying. But it only weighs 950kg. Drop those plump tyres down to 8psi and it treads lizard-light on a sand dune. 

I’ve rallied before, so am comfortable on the rough tracks, the dust and clay, but sand… it’s not just the navigation through it, but the technique for it, the topography of it, the blind crests, the deep, soft, inescapable bowls. It’s a maze. Right now I’m bobbing about in an ocean of sand in the rallying equivalent of a pair of water wings.

Luckily I have a co-driver who really knows his stuff. Meet Mike the mechanic, and without further ado let’s fast-forward to the stage start. Epic landscape, vast plain, hazy mountains, small puffs of distant dust signal other competitors. We’re counted down and set off with a wheeze of wheelspin. Three kilometres out into this vast plain, Mike has me pull over and stop. He’s not sure where we are. Or where we need to be going. We backtrack, we drive in a little circle so we can get an accurate compass bearing, we set off tentatively. Bet Peterhansel doesn’t have this sort of carry on with Jean-Paul Cottret. 

We are our own biblical parable – the blind leading the blind through the valley of rally, our promised land the finish flag some 200km distant. Right now that seems an inconceivable distance. We look up and everyone has scattered like seeds – not a single puff of dust on the horizon. Where the hell has everyone gone? One-minute intervals we went off at. And now no one. Mike regroups, and to be fair the navigation is at once simple (you have a route book and GPS beacons to reach) and fiendishly difficult (no maps, and often no roads, tracks or signs of humanity). And Morocco is calamitously huge and empty. 

After that, God knows the chronology. There was a patch of low sand dunes, the kind you can nearly see over. That went on for a while, and then we found a gap in the mountains, went up this big valley popped up onto a ridge, came back off it. Nearly turned back, then carried on, lost our way, found it. We climbed a pass, drove in circles a couple of times, came across a pair of lost bikers, there was hard clay, ground waves, big rocks, small rocks, black rocks, scrubland. We did 60mph, we did 5mph. I work out that vegetation means water and water means uneven ground. I learn that the hard way. 

And then there was the big dune section. The GPS checkpoint was only 3km away. It took us 45 minutes and 8km to find it, a fair chunk of that spent digging. Which is where we came in. I thought I’d remembered my dune driving lessons, but as we clambered a narrow ridge it gave way on one side. The car lurched to the right, more heavily than a car with a high centre of gravity should, so I threw lock on, gunned it and tried to outrun the avalanche. That went well. And then we got to the bottom, where it was all soft and we were stuck. Looking, pointing, digging, walking, checking and finally reversing and powering, had us out. 

Sometime later we finish. This happens much sooner than I expected, and I’m not relieved, I’m gutted. I wanted to carry on for hours more because I was having an absolute ball doing the Tuareg Rallye in my tiny rally car. I have no idea how we’ve done (and still don’t) but we seem to be the second Jimny home. I couldn’t give a hoot about the result, because what matters is getting back to camp, tracking down a cold beer and standing around in dusty overalls, shoes still filled with sand, shooting the breeze and telling stories as tall as the dunes.