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Old-timer rally from Beijing to Paris An unforgettable experience
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Markus Rauh Chairman, AO Board of Directors Davos, Switzerland markus.rauh@aofoundation.org
1 AOVA Chairman Markus Rauh (left), teammate David Hove, and Rauh’s wife Brigitte celebrate the rally’s successful finish in Paris, August 2007. 2 A 40 m-high monument to Genghis Kahn outside Ulaanbaatar.
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During a break in a business meeting in March 2005, Urs Ramsauer, an old friend of mine, complained to me about the frustration of his divorce. I tried to cheer him up and encouraged him to do something ‘crazy’ to help him forget his problems. All of a sudden his eyes started to glow and he said, “I’ll drive with my old-timer Ford V8 Sahara 1947 from Peking to Paris!” Not hesitating for a second, I replied, “Urs, if that is not a joke and if you organize it, I’ll join you!” That moment was the beginning of a great adventure. Urs is an old-timer-automobile fan and I am anything but that—I didn’t even have an old-timer car and had never participated in a rally. But the idea of doing something like this fascinated me so much that even my wife Brigitte recognized there was no discouraging me from undertaking this adventure. Only days later, I found out the reason Urs had proposed the Peking to Paris route: to mark the centenary of one of the greatest adventures in
the history of automobiles—the Peking-Paris Raid, a 14,000-km drive across the Gobi Desert and Siberia. In March 1907, the French newspaper “Le Matin” published a challenge to motoring enthusiasts to race from Peking (now Beijing) to Paris, an unthinkable endeavour given the automobiles and roads of the time. All of Europe was betting on whether or not it could be done. On June 10, 1907, five teams started the race at the Doschmen Gate of the Great Wall, north of Peking (incidentally, where the “Dinner on the Great Wall” took place during the last AO Trustees meeting in June 2007). Count Scipione Borghese won the race in 60 days with his Itala, a predecessor of today’s Fiat, arriving in Paris on August 10, 1907, a full two weeks before the second place Spyker. Borghese was accompanied by a journalist who regularly
30.4.2008 7:57:57 Uhr