We departed Gelio Train Station as celebrities, not those wannabe DJs and comedians back home in self-promoted tours to perform to a handful of Kenyans.
A sports person or artist is regarded as a celebrity in the rest of the world for promoting matters of human dignity.
This is none of the intention of the Ford World Rally Championship (WRC) Team Kenya at all. Filming is the cog which runs the sports wheel.
“We are ordinary boys from Africa inspired by the Jamaican Winter Olympics team of 1988 in (the 1992 movie) Cool Runnings,” said Mwangi Kioni, referring to the Jamaican bobsleigh team that defied the odds to compete at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
Kioni is McRae Kimathi’s navigator with the pair here for specialised training ahead of this coming week’s WRC Rally Sweden.
For three days, a filming crew from Poland has been producing short productions for M-Sport social and technical media platforms daily on the Kenyans’ journey to the WRC platform. Yesterday, they were waiting for us at the station to record our departure…
Fellow travellers thought we were visiting American gangster rappers, but were too scared to ask for autographs.
The filming had started at Gelio Hotel as we checked out yesterday and the cameras did not stop running until when we boarded the train and doors closed.
“Are you a movie star,” a courageous teen boy asked me because of my many-layered jackets and Aviator RayBan sunglasses to shield my eyes from winter sun glare. I nodded to the affirmative, just for the sake of it.
But seriously, Team Kenya has been well treated here. The boys have awoken to the realisation that motorsport is serious business.
Car manufacturers race to sell cars, drivers are the brand owners, not ambassadors and rallying is no corporate social responsibility stuff. For instance, Ford brought two Fiesta R3 cars from Poland, loaded in a fully-stocked prime mover workshop, for Kimathi, one as a spare in case of the principal breaks down.
As I observed, teams believe in drivers to develop cars. They take any feedback very seriously, starting with positioning of the seats.
Everybody wiser and happier
Testing is also another ingredient to complete the team’s work. A direct opposite of Kenya where testing a car on Nairobi’s Southern bypass is considered a job well done.
Kimathi did 42 laps of all kinds and levels of driving, including seven of them sitting next to Ford’s top driver Craig Breen, who was third in last month’s season-opening Monte Carlo Rally. And vice versa.
Together, they did 28 laps on Thursday.
Everybody was wiser and happier and more of this awaits Kimathi and Kioni from tomorrow when a former European rally champion takes over the mentorship programme.
Such programmes, when available in Kenya, will produce world class drivers, as Kimathi will surely demonstrate in the national series once he gets back home.
But here, as a budding rally driver Isaak, 17, told me, the first baby steps are to start early, be a rally mechanic, build your own car and produce rally finishes. You must enjoy your ride. Yes! enjoy your ride, Breen also told the Kenyans. It’s a job, but also a sport.
From the Dagala Winter Racing Circuit in Norway, a country so expensive that even a taxi driver or even a bar tender offers unsolicited advice of how to remain afloat, we headed to Umea, Sweden, for one week of intensive preparations for the WRC Rally Sweden.
Dagala is the location of this weekend’s Norwegian Rally Championship.
Unfortunately, we left as M-Sport Ford’s WRC team arrived at Dagala yesterday, led by team principle Malcolm Wilson and his world conquering team. In between test runs in Dagala, the Safari Rally story kept on cropping up, and will continue to do so in coming days.
“Yes it is a demolition derby,” said Dougland.
“It’s a rally of attrition,” corrected Kioni.
We left Gelio wiser, sorry, like celebrities. I mean real celebrities. And we made many friends of Africa decent. Their worries were our lifestyle and mode of travel.
There are no locations for the poor, like slums. In Finland, for example, a new father is entitled to cash recompense and three months’ paternity leave, with nine months for the mother. Education is free. Drunkards are collected from streets and taken to care centres to sleep off the effects of alcohol, attended by nurses before being released, sober.
People are not corrupt or exploitative. A good example is in Norway where a taxi driver will graciously urge you to walk in case of a short distance unknown to a foreigner, rather than take advantage of one’s ignorance.
Norway is more expensive than Paris, Milan and New York, for any average person.
A 300ml bottle of soda is Sh600 in a supermarket, a bottle of similar capacity water Sh500. And beer? A 300ml bottle sells at, yes, Sh1,625! A beef burger is anything between Sh2,500 to Sh3,500.
