10,000 miles in a Morris 1800

Modern rallies are basically pure speed events with almost no endurance element whatsoever – and in all honesty, that’s why I love them. Seeing a 400bhp, purpose-built rally car being launched through a forest stage or flung over a mountain road is a spectacle like no other. But as a test of a car and crew’s indefatigability, modern rallying doesn’t hold a candle to rallying as it once was.

Take the 1968 London-Syndey Marathon. Yes, really! That rally started in Crystal Palace on 24 November and ended three weeks later in Sydney – on the other side of the world. The 98 crews drove through central Europe and Turkey, into the Middle East, across India and over the Indian Ocean by ferry (itself a nine-day voyage) before landing in Perth, then right the way across Australia to the finish line in Sydney. The total road route was close to 10,000 miles.

It beggars belief. Just imagine bouncing across the sweltering Australian outback in a little saloon car with no air conditioning and only a few maps to navigate by, having already spent a fortnight doing exactly the same thing across Europe and Asia. The rally was won by Scotsman Andrew Cowan in a Hillman Hunter. In second? The charming little Morris 1800 you see in these images – affectionately known as the ‘Landcrab’ owing to its unusual appearance. Its driver was one Paddy Hopkirk.

This very car is being offered for sale by auction on PistonHeads right now. The hammer will drop on Wednesday evening, as it will for two other rallying machines from the same collection. The Ford Cortina and Triumph 2500 are both replicas of cars that competed in long-distance rallies during the same era.

The former pays tribute to the car driven to 10th overall by the great Roger Clark in the 1968 London-Syndey Marathon (he’d been leading the rally until numerous mechanical failures in Pakistan and India set him back) while the latter is a homage to the two cars that performed so well on the 1970 London to Mexico World Cup Rally, finishing second and fourth overall. In all its wisdom Triumph destroyed those two cars soon after, meaning a high-quality replica like this one is as close as you’ll get.

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