Can you feel the dust clinging to your sweaty body and choking your lungs?
This is the Ivory Coast Rally, also known as the Bandama Rally, on its final World Rally Championship appearance in 1992.
And this is the man who tamed the grueling event better than almost anyone else: Kenjiro Shinozuka.
Long before Toshi Arai and then Takamoto Katsuta were factory drivers in the WRC, Shinozuka was the man who blazed a trail for his Japanese countrymen to follow on the global scene.
To this day, Shinozuka remains the only Japanese driver to win in the WRC.
He did so twice, both times on the Ivory Coast. It could have been three, for he dominated the 1990 edition too before hitting a hole and breaking his Mitsubishi Galant VR-4.
Shinozuka made no such mistakes over the next two years, twice winning in the Evo version of the big Galant, which featured better cooling and was lighter.
Not that it would be particularly lightweight here; beefed up to meet the demands of a challenge often considered to be tougher than Africa’s other – more famous – great rally, the Safari.
It’s certainly looking purposeful in the picture above, albeit with only limited additional front protection, as it tackles a stretch on the forest edge. There’s a reminder too that those wing-mounted lamps were not unique to the Safari.
Though the Galant was by now outclassed on European events, the big, strong car was very much at home on the near 2000-mile route of the Bandama.
But even the VR-4 wasn’t bulletproof. Turbo trouble on the opening day lost Shinozuka an hour, before he steadily picked his way back up the order.
When Grégoire de Mevius’s Group N Nissan suffered engine failure on the final day, victory was Shinozuka’s by nearly 90 minutes from Bruno Thiry’s Opel Kadett GSi.
