Radios crackled into life. Richard Burns was coming in. Robert Reid said so. Saturday July 13, 2002 and an already mediocre day for Peugeot’s defending world champions was about to head south.
Welcome to Suswa. Welcome to the Safari.
From the first moment the first truck got stuck in the fesh-fesh days earlier, the teams had been furious about the location of the service park. Yes, the Great Rift Valley provided a stunning backdrop, but feathering throttles through powder-like dust was not supposed to be part of the spectacle.
Burns had damaged the front suspension on his Peugeot 206 WRC, but had made it out of the Kedong stage and nursed the car down the ensuing 25-mile road section. Fully aware of the dusty minefield that lay in wait for the number one car, the world’s media – radio scanners clamped to ears – gathered at the junction from the main road.
Burns’ position was horrible, a broken front corner meant he couldn’t give it the beans to pile through the dust. Worse still, the damaged corner was having the same effect as a snowplough. Then an anchor.
The 206 was soon swallowed. As soon as it stopped, it was doomed. Motion was everything (as I’d discovered to my cost two days earlier). Burns and Reid were out and immediately on it, searching for rocks, jackets, advertising boards, water bottles – everything went beneath the wheels to aid traction.
This superb picture from the Girardo & Co. Archive demonstrates the efforts that went into the rescue as the team looked on, helpless and bound by regulation.
Nothing worked.
Twenty-one years later, the FIA deputy president for sport remembers it all too well.
“I can still taste the dust,” said the Scot laconically.
