The Peking to Paris motor challenge is a map cap journey from Beijing along an adventurous route and ending up in Paris.

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The original Peking to Paris rally was in 1907 when Prince Scipione Borghese with his co-driver, Ettore Guizzardi and 4 other cars left the French Embassy in Peking on the 10th of June to drive the 15,000 kilometres (9317 miles) to Paris. They arrived two months later on the 10th of August, 20 days before the next car. The route followed the telegraph lines so they could report their journey along the way, each car carried it’s own journalist – modern Instagram perhaps? They wound their way through China, Mongolia, Russia, then in to Europe via St Petersburg.

There were no rules for their race, just a prize for the first car to Paris – a bottle of champagne.

The winner was the Italian Prince Scipione Borghese in the Itala car. This was a model without a top, powered by a four-cylinder engine of 7,433 cubic centimeters. The engine developed 45 horsepower, which allowed the car a maximum speed of 95 kilometers per hour.

It was not until 1990 that the rally was run again, this one was from London to Beijing.

In 1997, Philip Young from Endurance Rally Association decided to reboot the experience and the modern Peking to Paris was born and ran regularly until the pandemic, with rallies in 1997, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. We took part in the 2019 rally.

The rally is for vintage and classic cars, and will often have cars from the beginning of the 20th century competing. In the last one in 2019, which we were on, there was a steam car and also a motorbike.

The route changes each time due to logistical and geo-political reasons, but up until this one in 2024, broadly followed a similar route – China, Mongolia, Russia, over to Finland and down through Europe. In 2019, we found there were competitors who had done every rally since to 1997. In fact, the driver who won the classic category, a gentleman in his 80’s, was one such person. As you can imagine, this does give some teams a real advantage because they have driven so much of the route, and undertaken many of the circuit challenges before.

Of course, the route in 1907 was mostly overland with few roads for them to follow, unlike today, where it is not becoming harder to find a route that is not paved. Our route planner for 2019 said that when he started with the 1997 rally, there was only 70 kilometres of sealed road in Mongolia. Now he finds it hard to plan a route using desert roads because they are not used by locals much anymore and many have been reclaimed by the desert.

The rally is called an endurance rally. I think that you can see from the old photos, we don’t know the meaning of endurance, with our clean hotel rooms most nights and our mechanic sweep and medical teams.

So what does the rally involve?

Cars are broken into 4 categories: Pioneer – from the beginning of cars to (I think) 1925, Vintage – from 1925 to 1930, Vintageant – 1931 to 1951 and Classic all other cars up to 1976, the Classic category is broken down into those with engines under 2500cc and those with engines above that.

Each day we all start the rally at an allotted time, this is based on the age of your car and we take off at 30 second intervals. This start time can change as they work through an order which means all cars end up at the right place, at the right time.

We have a prescribed route which we all follow with special navigation, either tulip maps, or a digital compass (garmin). We get one large map book which shows the route as planned, and three route books which we use to get us from each day’s journey. I will do a separate blog when we get our route books and I can show you what the are and how we use them.

Along the route each day is a challenge – or two. It might be a time trial where we have to drive a certain part of the route in a specific time, or it might be on a race circuit. We tend to do more of the latter when we are in cities.

So every day you get up early, grab some breakfast. There is a car which drives the route the day before the rally and sends back instructions about any route changes. Andrew will review these changes and ensure he has these noted. We then get into the car ready for our start time, because of the age of the car we are usually near the beginning of the pack – this year there are 76 cars (last time there were more), we will start around the mid 20’s. We check our navigation again and we are ready to go.

Each day (unless it’s a non-drive day) we will drive between 250 and 650 kilometres. The shorter ones are usually the challenging desert/river crossing days and the longer ones are usually us on the motorway aiming to get from one place to another easily and quickly.

At the end of the day, you unpack your overnight gear – for hotels this is just an overnight bag, for campsites it includes your camping gear. We have chosen to hire one of their tents this year, we did this last time too, it means we arrive to a made up tent. Once unpacked you check the car and do any maintenance required – brakes, filters, spark plugs, grease etc. Hopefully it is not more than that. If it is, you may be with the mechanic teams, or even in a local workshop.

Only after the car is sorted can you shower and go in for dinner. Having your car ready for the next day is certainly a priority for the driver. The navigator will spend quite a bit of time reviewing the route for the next day, especially for the desert days.

In most places we stop locals from the village or town will come out to see the cars, we can draw quite a crowd. If our car is in good shape, Andrew and I like to let people, especially children, have a chance to sit in the car and take a photos. As one of the few female driver/mechanics, I do tend to get a bit of attention in my overalls with grease on my hands and face!

We are very lucky these days, our route and the support we get, ensures our safety and a reasonable level of comfort. It is certainly not the challenge faced in 1907. Most nights we are in 5-star hotels, or certainly be best standard a town has to offer. We have 7 nights camping, which is not glamping level, but there are good tents, a mess tent, shower tent, loo tents - usually a seat over a hole in the ground, although last time the people in Kazakhstan built flushing loos for us. We are well feed, even in the camp sites. In the hotels we are fed buffet style. A few nights Andrew and I slip out and get away from the buffet with friends.

It is a very social time and occasionally there will even be local entertainment.

So, that is a brief run-down of what the rally is. You will see more as we progress through each day. I look forward to sharing with you in my next blog some of the things we do to prepare for the rally.

An excerpt from The Modern World Book of Motors (c.1950) by Laurance H Gade, Sampson Low, Marston & Co.

When I was sharing with friends the links to how to follow our rally, the wonderful Alan Johnson connect in and sent me these pictures of excerpts from an old book he had read as a child. I hope you enjoy them.

© Charlotte Lockhart 2024. All rights reserved.