Triumph Rally Alaska 1992

The Event
Rallye Alaska Highway ’92 -To mark the 50th Anniversary of the building of the Highway.

The Competitors
Several classes, from Competition to Motorhomes, with the whole range in between. To me the most interesting cars were a 1915 Cadillac, a 1935 Aston Martin, a 1937 BMW Coupe, and 1965 Lotus Elan and my 1960 Triumph TR3A, but then not many people understand my preference for noisy, drafty. unpredictable machinery!

Our Crew
Simon Oliver and Bob Seymour – novice rallyists, brothers-in-law, and persuasive enough to con their employers into granting 12 days of leave from work in September!

The Goal
To reach Fairbanks at the same time as everyone else, with the car more or less in one piece. One look at the assortment of on-board computers, stop watches, trip meters, etc.. on some of the other cars is enough to dispel dreams of novice glory. A poorly calibrated Jaeger speedometer, a department store calculator and wrist watches just can’t compete.

Day by Day
We meet on a crisp mid-September morning in the Vancouver suburbs. An introduction to the pleasures of attaching sponsors stickers without bubbles or creased, first words exchanged with some of our fellow competitors, coffee and doughnuts, and we’re away on the first of two Monte Carlo style 500-mile days, north-east toward Dawson Creek. The first overnight stop is at an impressive new log-built resort near Valemount, B.C. The food is great, and the beer doesn’t run out; both contribute to a bonier. Don’t you wish
solid first night’s sleep!

Day Two
We blast up the highway through Jaspar and million dollar between Fairbanks Rocky Mountain views, and Anchorage. Yellow Lotus on our tall and past us, an afternoon gas stop, and re-starting in a biting wind, to the worrying suggestion of an ignition miss. Peace River, Alberta, appears with the cordoned-off welcome area and the first of many genuine small-town receptions, but we are preoccupied with Mr. Lucas. Removing the distributor cap confirms some suspicions – metal filings on the points, the distributor shaft is obviously wobbling, the bottom bushing must be worn! Aargh. Several phone calls, helpful local suggestions and an enquiry at the wreckers yard are fruitless: it’ll have to be a new distributor from Moss Motor’s Vancouver outlet, Octagon, flown up to Dawson Creek.

Day 3
We’re trying to start the car when a helpful bystander walks over. “Problems,” he says? “You should talk to Bill: he can lix anything.” Bill is at the other end of the parking lot wearing overalls with Bill written on them. “Lucas?”, he says. “I think I have one of those in my attic.”

As it turns out, there’s no obvious similarity between Bill’s attic model and ours, but undaunted, Bill removes our distributor from the car, dismantles it in his basement workshop, cuts out the old bushing, cuts a new bronze one, adds a grease nipple, rebuilds the unit and returns it to the car. He sets the point gap by eye and instructs me to “start her up”. Ignition, smooth and steady, better than it’s been for years! A genuine Cheshire Cat grin from Bill, and exchange of an absurdly small amount of money, and we’re on our way. It has been a virtuoso performance; delicate micrometers growing out of gnarled and well-used fingers, not a tool misplaced or dropped, and not a moment of hesitation or indecision. Worth the price of admission many times over!

There’s time for a first jelly-legged hill climb – we lit somewhere between the screaming Suzuki and a bubbling Bronco from Whitehorse – and our first view of the Paris Dakar BMW bike, flown over for this event, and driven by a suitable insane young German, Christian Doppler.

Days 4 to 9
The Rally these days blur into a succession of starts and finishes, some regularities or special stages, the humiliation of missing a checkpoint, which our dear (more experienced) fellow competitors had assured us did not exist, snow and mud on the highway, iced-up carburetors, lethargic wipers, overnights in wonderful small communities with hosts dispensing souvenir lapel pins, and time to tell the day’s stories, invent others and embellish everybody’s truths. The Aston and BMW crews still have their tops down, and as the mercury sinks, my estimation of their insanity grows!

The Fairbanks Finale
The final checkpoint is at Santa Claus’s house in the North Pole, and then it’s on to the meeting point in Fairbanks. Some casual ties, but thankfully, nothing too serious. A broken half-shaft has sidelined a competition-classed Saab on the first day: the Aston is running without a generator; several niggling problems have been dealt with by the Lotus crew, and a 19-12 Army Staff car from Montana has a frustrating ignition hitch. Christian Doppler comes off his bike more than once, but he is resilient. and survives a “twice-the limit” speed trap on the final day.

As for the results? Well turn them upside down and we won our class! But for us, the satisfaction of reaching the finish line in a car that was hardly built with this sort of trip in mind, is more than enough;

Post-Fairbanks
The concept of working for a living has receded into the distant past, but we know it has to be faced sooner rather than later. Five months later I have a car that is slightly the worse for wear, with dings and nicks to prove where we’ve been, but we also have photos, journals and souvenirs of a lifetime experience. 3,000 plus cramped, cold miles in 11 days did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for the car; I haven’t laughed as much in years, and I suspect that is what the Triumph’s designers had in mind.