the Opel Ascona 400 that won the 1982 World Rally Championship, was located after a conversation at 4am in a bar in Nairobi resulted in an address. Two years later the car lost for decades, but preserved in pieces across a property in Kenya, finally got a six-year restoration

https://petrolicious.com/blogs/films/django-the-rohrl-ascona-lost-in-africa

I can't find much about it right now, but this 48 Ford Deluxe was called the Gray Ghost, the around Australia rally in 1954

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1429194525380470&set=p.1429194525380470&type=3

a lot of Minis on the 1964 RAC Rally

 

Various iterations of the Mitsubishi Pajero / Montero won the treacherous Dakar Rally 12 times—including seven consecutive wins from 2001 to 2007. The Pajero that took Mitsubishi’s first Dakar win in 1985 was left to gather dust for 40 years was recently overhauled to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Mitsubishi's first Dakar win

https://www.thedrive.com/news/mitsubishi-restores-first-dakar-winning-pajero-after-decades-of-neglect

a rally P1600 with a good looking paint scheme!

Rally From Paris to the Pyramids, now in English

I posted about it on Oct, 5th, before there was any info in Elglish, and I've updated that, and they just released this new preview, far more thorough and fun than what was available last month

Tony Curtis, Dudley Moore, Benny Hill, and that goofball, Terry Thomas... whatever happened to making a fun comedy about a car rally? And the art of Ronald Searle, who spent most of WW2 as a POW in the Japanese torture camps on the Thai-Burma Railway, made famous in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

and this art? I dig it, but the information on the artist? Incredible. 

Ronald Searle was a British artist widely recognized for his watercolors and satirical cartoons. Often depicting contemporary and historical culture, his works exhibit a unique and highly-stylized quality. Born on March 3, 1920 in Cambridge, United Kingdom, Searle spent his youth studying at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. 

Searle’s talent was spotted before the war, when he won a scholarship at Cambridge Art School in 1938, meaning he could give up working as a parcel-packer at the Co-op. His father was a porter on Cambridge Station. His mother came from a line of clockmakers, who painted the dials of the clocks.

by 19 he was drawing for the Daily Express.

And then the war came

One month after his brigade arrived in Singapore in January 1942, the island was surrendered to the Japanese. Searle spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Changi Prison and on the Thai-Burma Railway, made famous in The Bridge on the River Kwai. (‘The film’s rubbish,’ says Searle, ‘Alec [Guinness], who was a friend, hated it. The idea that you’d be proud of building a bridge as a prisoner was ludicrous.’)

Using the one pen that survived the boat trip from England, Searle made 400 secret drawings (several are in the Cartoon Museum show) of his fellow prisoners dying of cholera, and the brutalities meted out by the prison guards. One St Trinian’s cartoon was drawn on the back of a notice listing recent deaths in the prison.

‘It all made me into an artist, though. I went into the war as an art student of 19, who did pictures of my mum and dad and the dog. Suddenly you’re drawing people who are going to die. With a subject matter so brutal, it was your duty to get something on paper that vaguely represented what was going on. I appointed myself an unofficial war artist. I developed far more as an artist in the four years I was in prison than in four years at art school.

After his liberation in late 1945, Searle began producing literature and drawings detailing his harrowing experience of captivity and torture. The artist's work has had a tremendous impact on popular culture, and featured frequently in the pages of the New Yorker and the News Chronicle.

 His varied illustrated series and stand-alone political cartoons, have influenced many contemporary illustrators and cartoonists, including Matt Groening and Pat Oliphant.

 Throughout his life, he received numerous awards, including the 1959 and 1965 National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award, and the appointment of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004

 

Skip the 1st 8 minutes to get to the GOOD stuff! Then skip from 12:54 to 14:57 and watch til 17:31

For more of Searle's airplane art, see https://thecarycollection.com/products/those-magnificent-men-in-their-flying-machines-1965-searle-ronald-richardson-bill-andrews-allen

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064688/?ref_=mv_close

https://www.artnet.com/artists/ronald-searle/21
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jan/03/ronald-searle-gerald-scarfe
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/from-the-archives-the-great-ronald-searle/

https://attemptedbloggery.blogspot.com/2013/08/ronald-searle-those-magnificent-men-in.html

Thank you Doug! 

the Islands of Japan rally

Rally — From Paris to the Pyramids - a movie about an eccentric inventor and his brave magpie and shy hedgehog who compete against a horrible tech billionaire in the legendary Paris-to-the-Pyramids rally in a very special racecar.

The story is built around how their bond is tested when they enter the world’s greatest rally.

The writer added international aspects, like the film’s villain, electric car manufacturer and billionaire Ellen Busk

The film starts in snowy Norway, then we move on to springtime in Paris, before traveling through the Alps and the green heart of Italy. The race ends in the dry desert of Egypt, passing the Sphinx.

In the race our heroes race against a hypermodern robot-controlled electric car, a wind-powered sail car, a nuclear rocket car, a coal-fueled train car, and even a massive American diesel hot rod — each design adds creativity and humor to the race

It seems to be a remake of a 70s movie:

https://www.animationmagazine.net/2025/11/the-fast-and-the-funny-rally-from-paris-to-the-pyramids-director-details-the-animated-racing-adventure/

If you thought your ol 60s land yacht wallowed in the corners.... compare it to this DS

 

at 5:43 and 8:54 in this video, which has very few old cars

this is a very cool example of a hard working guy making all the stuff for his rally car that he can't afford to buy... I had a great time talking to him today

Check out the former military switch panels pulled out of the junk at DRMO

I love that license plate is held on with cotter pins

And that the wing is hand made, and the mud flaps have hand painted sponsors and rear window scoops also have sponsors... so humorous!