The inside story of Waldegard’s incredible Safari win

17th December 2011

By Anthony Peacock

On this homepage you may have seen a picture of Bjorn Waldegard staring glumly through the twisted remains of a Porsche windscreen. It was taken on the epic East African Safari Classic – an event the Swede went on to win – and now it's time to tell the remarkable story behind the picture.

Waldegard is something of a specialist on the Safari – one of the biggest adventures in motorsport – although he struggles to put into words the exact reason why he's so good at it. "I think it's mostly down to experience," he says. "You just have to find a good feeling with the conditions."

His expertise was such that he was leading this year's event by 40 minutes, at the wheel of a Porsche 911 prepared by British experts Tuthill Porsche and co-driven by his son Mathias. Until disaster struck on day six.

"There was a truck stuck in a mudhole, and Mathias was telling me to pass it on the right," recounts Waldegard. "Unfortunately, I had already decided to pass it on the left."

The orange Porsche got sucked into the mud and hit the lorry hard on the right hand side, snapping the A-pillar and the rollcage on the co-driver's side of the car, and taking out the windscreen.

It was a lucky escape, but while the crew was only a few hundred metres from the end of the stage, retirement was a virtual certainty with the rollcage damaged beyond repair.

Team principal Richard Tuthill then takes up the story. "It looked like the dream was over. But then we hit upon an idea. We had a Porsche that was retired in our garage at Whistling Thorns. So we thought that if we were able to cut out the roll cage whole and install it in Bjorn's car, then we stood half a chance of being able to continue."

Problem was that this was an extremely tall order – the automotive equivalent of open-heart surgery – in the 45 minutes that was allowed, and it had never been practised before.

The alternative was almost certainly retirement though, so the Tuthill Porsche team set about the delicate task of extracting the 'donor' roll cage whole, which was completed just in time for Waldegard to check out of the regroup and roll into service.

The Tuthill boys – with Richard in person wielding a welder – then set about the whole operation in reverse, extracting the broken roll cage delicately before inserting the new one in and welding it in.

Things could have gone dramatically wrong at any point during the operation – it was a minor miracle that it fitted so neatly – but by some miracle the Tuthill Porsche team carried it off, with a net time loss of only 46 minutes. To make the fairy tale complete, Waldegard won the following stage (despite the fact that the repairs weren't really completed: there was still a fair amount of tidying up to do, and a windscreen to replace, at service that evening).

"It was one of those real Safari stories that makes the event special," says Richard Tuthill.  "We were delighted to take the first-ever win for Porsche on the Safari, but I'm not sure if many people know just how close we were to losing it..."