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Safari Rally legends

President William Ruto while flagging off the Safari Rally at Loldia, Naivasha.

This weekend, the rally, a round of the World Rally Championship celebrates its 70th anniversary and unlike the days gone by when the vehicles would crisscross vast East African landscapes, the current event is mostly taking place in the dusty bowls of Naivasha.

The rally was so popular that even the unschooled would know the top drivers by name, the legends who kept the whole country and at some point, East Africa, awake.

There was Joginder Singh, Vic Preston, Shekhar Mehta, Bjorn Waldegard, Juha Kankkunen, Hanu Mikola and Patrick Njiru.

These names left a mark even before the advent of live television when transistor radios ruled the airwaves. With the radios, Kenyans followed the action and could tell the exact location of the lead cars.

Joginder Singh was among the most successful Kenyans during the rally heydays.

Born in a family of 10 sons, the "flying Sikh" began his career at the age of 26 and won the East African Safari in 1965 in a Volvo PV544.

His second win came nine years later during a wet Safari Rally, this time, in a 1600cc Mitsubishi Lancer. Two years later, he led Lancerton to yet another historic win.

Vic Preston Jr

For much of the 1980s, the rally was dominated by Ugandan-born Kenyan, Chandrashekhar Mehta, or Shekhar Mehta. Unlike the Joginders and Prestons, Mehta's family did not have a background in motoring, being sugar plantation owners in Uganda.

The Mehtas were among the Asian families that were expelled from Uganda bythen-dictatorr president Idi Amin. The five-time Safari Rally winner dominated the rally in most of the 1980s, becoming a household name during the glorious days of the rally.

In the 1973 rally, Mehta was declared the winner, beating the closest driver by less than a minute, the closest margin of victory in Safari rally history. Mehta participated in numerous global races, most of that time navigated by his wife, Yvonne Pratt.

Mehta's last win in the rally was in 1982, navigated by Mike Doughty in the Nissan Violet GT. As the Motorsport Memorial journal reported, Mehta found the going tough in subsequent years as he could hardly keep up with emerging technology.

"In the following seasons the Datsun Nissan cars which had dominated the rally for years, were overtaken by more modern technology introduced by different manufacturers such as Audi, Lancia and Toyota. Mehta, who had already beaten European drivers, could not match the firepower of the likes of Juha Kankkunen, Ari Vatanen, Miki Biasion, Hannu Mikkola and Bjorn Waldegard," reported the journal.

The latter names moved the rally from the mid-1980 into the 1990s, interchanging the wins among them over the decade.

In 1987, Mehta suffered a fatal crash during the Pharaoh Rally in Egypt. He had a badly injured back and a collapsed lung bringing his career to an abrupt end. He died in the United Kingdom in April 2006.

Patrick Njiru receiving keys from one of his sponsors in 1988.