by Ross Finlay (22 Dec 02)

Looking at the route for the 2003 Monte Carlo Rally, already very compressed in distance compared with the old-style events, it seems most peculiar that the Thursday evening start in Monaco will be a purely ceremonial affair. The real start is the following morning, miles away to the north-west at Gap.

The works teams, of course, have already been testing, and any driver who doesn't finish in the first three will be regarded in newspaper and television reports as hardly worth bothering about.

Times have changed there too. Semi-veteran enthusiasts, quite rightly, extol the successes of the BMC works team, which had a great record in the Monte Carlo in the mid-1960s. But look at the performance of the works cars - a mixture of MG Magnettes and Austin Westminsters - in the 1955 Monte. Admittedly in a much bigger entry than is allowed these days, their best performance was 68th overall. The other team cars finished in positions 178, 202, 232 and 237!

Nowadays, in what are usually very much milder winters, and in a completely different kind of event where it's pure speed rather than endurance which counts, the problem is no longer battling the elements and scrambling to reach Monte Carlo itself without running into penalty or even retirement time.

There are few things more depressing in motorsport than the kind of thing that used to happen, especially to private entrants, as a navigator knew his driver was falling too far behind schedule. At which point would it be diplomatic to mention the fact that, for all the slithering around on snow and ice along the mountain roads, they were going to be into exclusion time at the next control, and might as well chuck it right now?

Rallying With Wolves

In the 1930s, even getting to some of the farther-flung start controls could be a hair-raising business, with cars stuck in Balkan snowdrifts on the way to Athens, as the crews listened nervously to the howling of wolves. There's none of that now, of course, but one problem still not unheard-of is a falling-out between driver and co-driver.

In the history of the rallying, probably nothing brings those two strands - endurance and aggravation - so close together as the story of Maurice Gatsonides's run in the 1937 Monte, when his co-driver was a man for whom I've always had the deepest sympathy, Kees Sanders.

Many of us have been in situations where we've gradually come to feel out of our depth, but Sanders should never have been in an event like this at all. He'd been recommended to Gatsonides by the Royal Dutch Automobile Club, not very reliably, as an experienced driver who (unlike Gatso's partner of the previous year) could be relied on to pay his full share of the expenses.

Well, there are at least two published versions of what followed, one in the book Rallies and Races and another in the laterGatso: The Never-Ending Race.

Gatsonides entered for the 1937 Monte in his garage's Hillman Minx demonstrator, which already had 50,000 miles on the clock. He and Sanders left for their starting point at Umeå in northern Sweden seven days in advance of the rally - and that turned out to be only just enough.

There was a colossal overnight snowstorm in Denmark and, despite much effort, all the cars on the route the Hillman was following across Jutland had to be abandoned. The stranded motorists struggled through driving snow and furious wind, trying to find shelter, when Sanders, who hadn't been feeling well even in Holland, lay down and said he couldn't go any farther.

Gatso recalled: "Talking to him, threatening, and explaining the danger was of no avail. I swore at him, and had to kick him to get him up again and keep him up. Otherwise, of course, he would have frozen to death in no time, as the temperature was minus 35 degrees Celsius."

Digging Their Way Through

They did get to shelter, though, and spent the following morning helping to dig the car out of the snow: "Five hours of hard work by ten men with coal shovels was needed to get the car to the guest house two miles away." The next three miles took the whole afternoon, but then "conditions improved, with the eight miles to Fredericia being accomplished in two hours."

Gatsonides had been doing all the driving, but once they reached Sweden he let Sanders take the wheel for a while. That was no good either. In one of the towns on the way to Umeå there was a lot of banging and crashing as Sanders didn't realise he was bumping over the raised markers in the middle of the road. In fact, he admitted that, after the rally, he'd probably go for an eye test.

Gatso then made the inevitable decision that he'd have to drive the whole of the rally himself, and Sanders, who had little option, accepted it.

Now, Umeå to Monte Carlo, by that year's route, was something like 2400 miles. The rally started in an outside temperature of minus 25 degrees Celsius. Inside the Minx, it was about minus ten, so cold that some soft drinks bottles in the back of the car froze and shattered.

Always ingenious, Gatso had rigged up a Heath Robinson arrangement involving a funnel behind the radiator fan, feeding into a steel tube laid across the exhaust manifold, then wafting warmed air to the inside of the windscreen via the mouthpiece of a vacuum cleaner. That kept a seven-inch ice-free slot on the screen, and allowed the crew to warm their chilled fingers a little. They also lit some small candles and placed them along the top of the dashboard.

The roads stayed icy all the way to the south of Paris, and Gatsonides drove solo for five days without any overnight stops. On several occasions he decided to retire at the next time control, but always changed his mind, for example at Venlo, where his fiancée and his spaniel both gave him a warm welcome.

Getting Through Clean

On the fourth night there was a 125-mile regularity section with an exact average speed to be maintained throughout. Gatso was always an expert at this kind of thing, but would have been in no fit state to concentrate hard enough, except for the fact that in Sweden he'd managed to acquire a couple of bottles of powerful spirits. Having a swig just before the start of the regularity section, he "felt as if a bomb had exploded inside me". He managed the test without loss of marks and, thanks to an average speed gadget he'd helped to design, without needing much assistance from his partner.

In fact, he had a clean sheet all the way through the rally, then slept for 23 hours during the rest day before the final driving test on the Monte Carlo promenade. He took the Hillman through the test smartly enough to finished the rally 20th overall, second in his class, and winner of the Barclays Bank Cup (the biggest trophy at the prizegiving ceremony) for the best performance by a British car:

"We then feasted magnificently, slept long and well, and thought of that very useful saying, 'Never say die.'"

And his co-driver? Well, there's a post-rally photograph with a smiling Gatsonides sitting on the bonnet of the Hillman, which is bedecked with a laurel wreath. Sanders is standing at one side, an unfathomable expression on his face. He may have been remembering that, when they got their supply of Swedish alcohol, Gatso had said that he was pretty useless, "but might be able to open a bottle for me".

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