Why The Safari Rally is The Craziest, Toughest, and Most Legendary
By Mwambazi Lawrence
The WRC Safari Rally is coming back to mess up your neatly pressed shirt and give your liver a workout from March 20th to 23rd, 2025 and if you’re a rally fan who’s still sleeping like a baby, sijui (I don’t know) what you’re doing with your life. And If you’re sipping on chai (tea) like it’s just another day, bro, wewe uko sawa? (Are you okay?). You are not ready. But if you’ve already packed 17 jerrycans, a tent, enough snacks to last a famine, and a spare liver just in case, welcome to the real rally fan club.. But before you grab that faded Subaru cap and start yelling “Flat Out!”, let’s pause and answer a simple question:
Why is this rally such a big deal?
Let’s rewind to 1953. Queen Elizabeth II had just taken the throne, and somewhere in East Africa, a brilliant lunatic had an idea. “You know what would really celebrate this royal moment? A completely insane car race across the most unforgiving terrain this side of Mars.” And thus, the Coronation Rally was born a royal nightmare for drivers, but an absolute feast for anyone who loves watching expensive machinery suffer.. Later, someone wisely renamed it the Safari Rally because what’s cooler than tearing through wildlife parks, dodging giraffes, and outrunning rhinos? Beats the hell out of tea parties and cucumber sandwiches.
One of the vehicles that participated in the 1953 Coronation Safari.
Back in the day, every Easter, Kenya transformed into the World Capital of Automotive Suffering. The rally stretched across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda 4,000km of pure automotive abuse. Cars broke. Dreams shattered. Mechanics cried. The roads were so bad, calling them “roads” was basically fraud.
Modern drivers complain about “loose gravel” and “rough stages.” Please. In old-school Safari, if you didn’t get stuck in mud up to your headlights, swarmed by mosquitoes the size of helicopters, or chased by a rhino with attitude problems, were you even trying? Out of 80 cars, maybe 10 would finish. Not because they were slow but because everything else, from wildlife to weather, was actively trying to murder them. This wasn’t a rally this was an off-road pilgrimage, with wildlife hazards, potholes you could baptize a child in, and rains that made Noah’s Ark look like light drizzle.One minute you’re flying down a dusty trail, the next you’re doing backstroke in floodwaters next to a very confused hippo. Your co-driver’s job included navigating, wildlife management, and occasionally prayer leadership..
Fast forward to today, and the 2025 edition will see the action centered around Naivasha, right in the heart of the Rift Valley. The stages Camp Moran, Loldia, KenGen Geothermal, Kedong sound fancy, but they’re basically beautiful death traps covered in dust, mud, and the occasional zebras that forgot to read the race schedule and with zero respect for FIA regulations. Then there’s Hell’s Gate, which isn’t named after a church choir retreat. It’s exactly what it sounds like a place where suspensions cry, tires weep, and co-drivers suddenly remember they forgot to write their wills.
The thing about Safari Rally weather is that it doesn’t play fair it plays by its own rules. Start a stage under perfect blue skies? Cute. Five kilometers later, you’re in Noah’s Ark: Safari Edition. Rivers overflow, your car becomes a submarine, and you become an unwilling contestant on “Survivor: Motorsport Edition.”. And the mud? Oh, the mud. Safari Rally mud has its own personality it’s clingy, rude, and holds lifelong grudges. against rally cars. It’s the only place where you’ll see a million-dollar rally car being rescued by a random herdsman with a very short rope and a cow named Ferdinand
If rain doesn’t get you, the dust will. Safari dust isn’t your average roadside powder it’s ultra-fine, sneaky, and enters places no dust should ever enter (including places on your body you didn’t know existed). Visibility drops to zero, and the co-driver starts guessing directions based on the feeling in their knees and ancestral whispers.. Then, just when you think you’re safe, boulders the size of houses jump out of nowhere, and your suspension says, “Pole” (Sorry) before breaking into a million pieces.
Through all this madness, legends were born men who drove like their ancestors were chasing them. Take Joginder Singh, aka The Flying Sikh, who won the Safari three times when winning meant surviving both the rally and all the wildlife. Lions, elephants, zebras you name it, Safari Rally drivers have swerved to avoid it. Joginder’s car was so reliable, some say it ran on pure willpower and Caffaine.
Joginder and Jaswant Singh celebrating their victory at the 1965 Safari Rally, in a Volvo PV544
Then there’s the Unsinkable Seven the only drivers who finished the brutal 1963 Safari Rally, out of 84 starters. If you ever meet one of them at a bar, buy them a drink immediately they deserve it more than anyone.Their story is now part of rally legend.
After a 19-year break, Safari returned to the WRC in 2021 and oh boy, it was like it never left. Cars broke. , drivers cried (in front of cameras),. Mechanics aged a decade overnight. The dust came back, the rain came back, and so did that chaotic East African spirit where the whole village comes out to cheer, and the zebras still refuse to clear the racing line as Ott Tanak will tell you what happened to him last year.
Now listen closely. If you call yourself a petrolhead in Africa and you’ve never watched the Safari Rally live, your opinions are immediately invalid. You can’t sit around discussing turbochargers and suspension setups if you’ve never felt Safari dust clog your nostrils or chased a rally car down a village road with 400 strangers and a goat named Fred. Safari Rally is more than a motorsport event it’s a cultural baptism. Without it, your rally credentials are weaker than a Datsun’s suspension on Kedong’s fech fech dust.
Rally fans cheer the action at the Kasarani Special Stage of the 2022 WRC Safari Rally
As Safari Rally week approaches, here’s my final warning. Don’t be that guy who shows up in a Toyota Vitz, expecting to keep up with rally fans in their off-road beasts. Don’t be that girl who asks “why are they driving so fast?” (It’s a rally, not Sunday mass). And please, for the love of petrol, don’t ask if the rally cars have AC. They have dust, heat, and fear that’s the only air conditioning they get.
Miss it, and your grandchildren will think you were born boring.
See you in Naivasha!
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