Story by Lori Nelson

The trouble is, they all sound good on paper -- rally races that run from the tip of South America to Alaska, or trace the perimeter of Australia, or start out in Europe and end up on the sands of the Sahara.

But, like a lot of great ideas, off road rallies often become bogged down in financial realities and overwhelmed by logistics very few off road rallies ever make it from the minds eye to the starting line. When these events fail, its usually the hapless guy who's sunk huge chunks of cash and time into prepping a vehicle who is most often burned.

This could have been the outcome of the first annual Trans Amazon Rallye, which certainly sounded like a great idea to the 71 teams who put up more than a half million dollars in combined entry fees to participate.

What off-road maniac could resist an 8,500 mile long route through the mud and muck of the Amazon Basin at the height of the rainy season, or the chance to crisscross the South American continent from Venezuela to Brazil, to Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina?

It was not until they were fully committed, however, that competitors suspected that the Rally might be a sort of three card monte of motorsports, or, as some referred to it in moments of bitterness, the 'Transcamazon Rallye' Yet the story of the TransAmazon Rally turned out to be one of human triumph in the face of adversity, about a group of people who, through sheer determination, made auto-racing history.

PARIS-DAKAR REDUX?

The Rallye, as an idea, began with the noblest aspirations According to Michel Jean-Pierre, founder arid director of Exploration Society of America, which "sponsored" the event, this was no mere road race, but the fulfillment of the late French rally champion Threrry Sabines long-held dream to start a Western-Hemisphere equivalent to the notorious Paris-Dakar Rallye.

Sabine, one of the three founders of Paris-Dakar, had been killed in a helicopter crash during the 1986 rally, and Jean-Pierre, with the blessing of Sabine's widow, was to follow through on his intentions.

By 1986, slick, glamorous ads for the TransAmazon Rallye were appearing in the nations top publications, and interested parties who called ESA's headquarters in New Orleans were wooed with copious amounts of promotional material. Brochures, press releases, bulletins, updates, videotapes, and safety spec manuals were rushed out to keep potential entrants abreast of the growing list of big-name sponsors such as Jeep Venezuela and Cafe Colombia, and of the extensive media coverage garnered. According to one release, "Hundreds upon hundreds of periodicals will be covering the event, from Soviet Sports to Garrr (a popular Japanese motorsports magazine) to several international editions of Playboy."

In hindsight, it's easy to figure that the Rallye's Madison Avenue packaging alone must have cost ESA a bank-breaking fortune, but one photo in particular that appeared in the ESA magazine seemed to sum up Jean-Pierre's approach to the event. Taken during a reconnaissance trip to South America, it shows Michel Jean-Pierre, dressed in a svelte Banana Republic ensemble, tete-atete with a comely female, eating caviar and drinking champagne.

BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE $350,000?

The first real sign of trouble did not surface, however, until the tech inspection and vehicle exhibition in New Orleans, held during the first week in April 1968. Some 200 competitors finally had the chance to meet each otherand compare notes.

Rumors circulated that sponsors were dropping out rapidly, and that ESA was in grave financial straits. But when entrants spoke with Jean-Pierre and ESA staff members, expressing doubts about putting their vehicles on the ship to Cartegena, Colombia, the following week, they were assured that all was well.

The vehicles were shipped April 4, and on April 9, while some entrants were already en route to Cartegena, ESA sent out letters via express mail advising entrants with Formula 2 and 3 sponsorships that they would have to pay airfare and hotel accommodations in Cartegena, but would be reimbursed.

For fees of $5,000 per vehicle and $1000 per crew member, Formula 2 and 3 entrants had been promised an all-expenses-paid trip. Although ESA claimed a sponsor had dropped out at the last minute, causing a temporary cash-flow problem, few entrants believed it, and most left for Cartegena with a sense of impending disaster.

On April 17, five days before the scheduled start of the race in Cartegena, during the first TransAmazon Rallye meeting at a beachfront hotel, Jean-Pierre announced to the nearly 200 competitors that there were, in fact, no funds for the Rallye. It turned out that they were about $350,000 short.

The uproar that ensued went beyond the obvious reasons and was due, in part, to the group's unanimously held belief that ESA knew the situation during tech inspection and had nevertheless allowed the competitors to load their vehicles on the ship.

Exacerbating this outrage was the fact that those vehicles were now impounded on the shipshipping charges had yet to be paid. Competitors would have to shell out $600 just to reclaim their vehicles and then, in an exercise in futility, pay again to have them shipped back to the States.

By day two, most entrants had become more concerned with figuring out a possible plan of action than with plotting revenge, though it would be many more weeks before the public perception of Jean-Pierre would mellow into the conclusion that he was just another well-meaning dreamer who'd gotten in way over his head.

"We came down here to rally, so let's rally!" was the battle cry of the second meeting. Hailing from the U.S., South America, Europe, Japan, and Scandinavia, this group of competitors was not about to fold up over a cash shortage. After all, these were the same guys you'd see at night on the streets paying the local shock-treatment vendor for a dose of high voltage on his little machine, just to see how much they could take. As many had sunk their life savings into their vehicles and even quit their jobs, no one wanted to call it quits after coming this far; so the competitors started shaking out their own pockets.

TO THE RESCUE

Like any telethon, the TransAmazon fund-raising drive had its moments of cliff-hanging suspense, despair, and jubilation, as, dollar by dollar, the entrants scraped together the $150,000 minimum required to run the rally. A seven-man organizing committee was elected from the group, which in turn appointed Leopoldo Barbosa, head of the Venezuelan Automobile Federation, as race director. JeanPierre and ESA were then politely, but firmly, shown the door.

Due to the lower budget, the rally was reclassified from an F1SA Class I to an FIA Class II rally (with reduced medical and communication support), which caused some grumbling among the world-class drivers. But the rally was on.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in auto-racing history. The participants had not only taken over management of the event but had overcome the nearly insurmountable logistics of putting together a rally route from scratch, one which crossed a continent and involved five different countries, in exactly four days. (Some host countries dropped out for ecological and political reasons; the final route comprised Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.)

On April 22, the original starting date, 71 motorcycles, Jeeps, cars, and trucks took off through the streets of Cartegena, piloted by drivers who felt they'd already won a major victory, and cheered by crowds of well-wishers who'd followed the drama on the local news.

The pack ran the gamut from professional teams, such as Englishmen Russel Gooding and Roger Jenkins in a Land Rover, and their immediate competition, Americans Ron Clyborrie and Ken Walters in "Maybe Manana,' their Jeep Cherokee, to semiprofessionals and amateurs. The South Americans were well represented, with teams from every host country. Eight husband-and-wife teams were entered, one of which was even spending its honeymoon en route.

The only all-female team came from Japan the Supergals in a Nissan Pathfinder. The team's co-drivers, both 23 years old, were publicity stuntwomen working for a sportswear firm (and national celebrities, with their own weekly television show). At least a half dozen entrants, adding a little background texture, had competed before at Paris-Dakar.

The TransAmazon Rallye more than lived up to its promise as an "Adventure of a Lifetime." Running for 26 grueling days across 8,000 miles of Andean peaks, Peruvian deserts, and tropical wetlands, the drivers' skill, strength, and stamina were tested in every way.

So were their vehicles; the first three-day stretch of 15-hour-a-day driving from Cartegena to Bogota swiftly eliminated the less serious contenders (only 43 of 71 vehicles arrived on schedule). Since much of that route was up in the mountains on bad gravel roads, and at altitudes reaching 11,000 feet, brake, suspension, and overheating problems left a string of irreparably crippled vehicles.

FATAL DISTRACTIONS

Looking for a little intensity? Take a caravan of vehicles whose drivers are nauseous and dizzy from altitude sickness, set them on crumbling-gravel mountain switchbacks with 1,000-foot dropoff 's, throw up an opaque cloud of dust to reduce visibility to zero, and then add a couple of major landslides. If that doesn't do the trick, throw in the sight of a mangled Toyota 4Runner wrapped around a tree with two dead Chilean national champion drivers inside; they lost control on a curve coming out of the aforementioned mountain range.

And that was just the first day.

The potential obstacles of landslides, military skirmishes, terrorist activities, tear gas, and student demonstrations added some new wrinkles to the experience of rally racing in Colombia, albeit in a peripheral sense.

Once out of the mountains of Colombia and across the border into Ecuador, the Rally lost its pitch of last-minute chaos and settled into the relentlessly structured rhythm it would have for the rest of the routethe daily road grind and the ensuing nightly collapse at the hotel or campsite.

A lush, green country of hilly pastureland, and one of South America's best-kept secrets, Ecuador offered drivers a taste of the Amazon rain forest, which had been the original route's primary focus and what many of the vehicles had been geared for. Rally support in Ecuador was extremely well organized, in sharp contrast to Peru, the rally's next destination; there, Murphy's Law seemed to prevail across the land.

Hotel rates dipped for Peruvians but skyrocketed for foreigners; gas was only 25 cents a gallon, but of atrocious quality; and there was not a tire to be had in the country due to a two-year-old manufacturing strike against the government. But of far more serious consequence were the grossly inaccurate road books, which caused all of the Peruvian teams save one to drop out in protest. In a race where the ability to speak fluent Spanish became a critical factor in asking directions, many teams lost valuable time getting lost or stranded because of the Peruvian road books.

In Peru, where much of the course consisted of arid desert along the coast with forays into the Andes, drivers encountered what they unanimously agreed was the worst section of the rallythe stretch from Chiclayo to Trujillo, with a hellacious prime section in the mountains between Cajamarca and Cajabamba.

Like most nightmares, it began innocently enough with a paved road along the coast, but quickly disintegrated into a boulder-strewn goat path in the hills. Three-foot-deep potholes, mud, and rocks created a body-battering, will-my-reproductive-organs-ever-function-ag ain? enduro run through a surreal landscape, past grimy, desolate mining camps where dispirited people stared blankly at the Mad Max-style caravan careening through their environment. That night, only 19 vehicles made it to the hotel.

BUT DO THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME?

It was hard to tell where the empty deserts of Peru ended and those of Chile began. By now, fewer than 50 vehicles were still officially in the rally, and the psychological atmosphere had reached a perseverance stage. Nevertheless, the frequent joke after leaving Peru was how glad everyone was to be in a country run by a military dictatorship; at least things get done here.

Spirits that had been flagging revived when racers met with superbly organized routes, competent medical and police
support, and accurate road books. Freak accidents began occurring, however, which gave evidence of the strain that the teams were under after three weeks on the road. In one mishap, the John Bearce Ford Bronco team's navigator was run over by a competitor's vehicle when he stepped out to take a picture.

Crossing the snow-draped mountains at the border of Chile and Argentina signaled the Rallye's home stretch, with the autumn foliage and chilly air of Argentina, a welcome contrast to the Chilean deserts. By now, the eliminated teams outweighed those still in the running, but the group, bonded by its extraordinary experiences, continued to travel together to reach the shipping point in Buenos Aires. Nightly barbecues hosted by local automobile clubs, awash with wines from the region, did much to cement the camaraderie.

Yet tragedy dogged the end of the rally; the day before reaching the finish line in Buenos Aires, the Supergal Pathfinder rolled on a straightaway, and copilot Aikiko Fukuba, not wearing her harness, broke five ribs and suffered severe internal injuriesher heart stopped beating three times on the operating table. Fortunately, she pulled through and another female Japanese journalist co-piloted the Supergals across the finish line.

A CHEROKEE CHAMP

After 26 days on the road, nobody knew who the spruced-up, clean-shaven, nattily attired guys were who showed up at the awards dinner. To no one's surprisethis being their backyardthe South Americans swept the awards in the stock 2x4, stock 4x4, and modified 2x4 categories.

No one in prototypes and trucks finished, but Americans took all three honors on motorcycles. With little more than an hour's jump on the British Land Rover team, the Maybe Manana Cherokee driven by Clyborne and Walters won the modified 4x4 category, along with their heavy-duty Ford F-350 crewcab dualie support vehicle that was the envy of all who viewed it.

Maybe Manana not only placed first in its category but second overall. The Americans also received awards for top team, top support crew for being the only team to sweep all sections in a given country (Chile)and for being the only Americans to finish the race and the only American-built vehicle to finish.

With only 11 official finishers out of the original field of 71, the TransAmazon Rallye put itself on a par with Paris-Dakar in terms of sheer, brutal challenge. When asked if he would do it again, Ron Clyborne said, "Absolutely. The experience was incredible, not just on a competitive racing level but in terms of all the other challenges we facedemotional, physical, mental, and working together as a team. After 26 days of living on the edge, you get addicted to it."