One of the crews entered for the Kenya Airways Safari Classic this November emerged as clear winners of the recent Rallye du Maroc Historique. This was the Belgian pairing of Bernard Munster and Johan Gitsels in their BMA prepared Porsche 911. By taking it easy on the first day, subsequently they were able to avoid running as first car on the road and soon were leading, a position they maintained to the finish. Munster was overjoyed: “Not only did our car not experience a single technical problem throughout the week, but we even managed to improve its handling during the event. The result was highly positive, which is promising for the future.”

 

The Rallye du Maroc also allows more modern cars to compete. Grégoire de Mevius and Alain Guehennec, who will be driving another BMA Porsche on the Safari Classic, took the opportunity to enter in a Group B Nissan 240RS, a car dating from 1985. De Mevius finished second overall and won the modern category.

 

There were other Safari Classic entrants who were taking the opportunity to get in some practice on African roads. There were notable performances from Andrew Siddall and Carl Williamson in the Datsun 260Z that they will be driving in East Africa in November and from the Argentinian crew of Jorge Perez-Companc and José Volta in a Viking Motorsport Ford Escort RS1600. The Datsun of Siddall finished fourth overall and third in the category for older cars while Perez-Companc finished with exactly the same penalties as Siddall but was classified fifth after a tiebreak.

 

Viking Motorsport had a second Escort RS1600 entered that is scheduled for the Safari Classic. This was the car driven by the Swede, Jan Hagman who, on this occasion was accompanied by Hans Sylvan, a works co-driver for Stig Blomqvist and Per Eklund in the 1970s. Hagman finished thirteenth in the older category. There were forty-eight finishers in all.