Standing on Vipingo Ridge, just north of Mombasa, reality bites hard for the MRF engineers. The ambient temperature is knocking on the door of 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and beneath their feet, the road is cooking nicely at almost double that.
MRF’s planned Kenya tire needs more work. And with the East African Safari Classic just weeks away, there’s a certain nervous energy around the team inland from Kenya’s coast.
Having supplied the European Rally Championship and countless domestic series around the world for much of the past six years, this month’s nine-day 1,200-mile epic was going to be the icing on the cake or the straw that broke the camel’s back. There wasn’t really anything in between.
From next year until 2031, MRF will supply all competitors on all East African Safari Classic events. That will mean controlling 3,500 tires for each event on a route which rarely stands still and moves north-west through Taita towards Nairobi. For this year, it’s a dry run dealing 400 tires for a select group of cars.
A spokesperson from MRF smiled at the memory of a fairly intense November-December.
“MRF is a company driven by passion, performance and perfection,” they said. “There were no holidays for any of us, already we are working hard towards next year’s European Rally Championship – but before that we had Safari. We knew this was going to be a lot of work, but we knew also there could be a really nice reward.”
We had two weeks to make this new tire and ship it out to AfricaMRF spokesperson
MRF’s base medium compound gravel tire – the one used extensively in ERC – was selected as a benchmark when testing began in October.
“We completed around 500 kilometers of testing,” said the spokesperson. “We were running with Richard Tuthill on one of his Porsches – the feeling was that if we could make the tire work and last on the back of a 911, with the weight, power and loads that kind of car brings, it would work anywhere. But the roads in Africa are quite different to what we have seen in the ERC. Of course, we have seen some rocks and boulders at times, but we haven’t seen them for a whole stage of 100 kilometers or something like this.
“As expected, we knew we would need to put some more strength to the sidewall of the tire – but this is not always so easy. You have to remember there are so many aspects to the construction of the tire. Yes, you can make the sidewall stiffer and more durable, but you also need the crown of the tire to maintain the grip and if you’re having a tire too stiff, this is going to generate more heat which can compromise the compounds.
“And all of the time we’re going to be running the tire on some of the longest straights on gravel roads anywhere in the world – we knew this was going to generate a lot of heat and raise the potential for tire integrity issues. It was a big job. And when we got the data from the testing back to Chennai in India, then we had two weeks to make this new tire and ship it out to Africa.
“Everybody in the company was working so hard and just getting the job done – this is the way with MRF from the top management all the way down through the company. The tires were airfreighted into Nairobi, then took 11 hours down the road to Mombasa and we had the first tires on the first car within two hours of them getting there.
“We hadn’t really had time to test this new construction, but the team was confident we would have it right. We went for it and it worked.”
Harry Hunt and Steve McPhee won the event comfortably in the MRF-fitted Porsche.
“That was the icing on the cake,” smiled the spokesperson. “For us, going to the Safari this year was about learning and further refining all of the data and knowledge we have built up from the ERC since 2020. We have done that. We know what we need to supply 60 or 70 cars in Africa from now until 2031.
“Celebrating a victory on our first serious effort on this event was something really special for everybody in the company.”
