1949 Record Run - Austin A70 Hampshire

At 4pm GMT on Wednesday 14th December 1949, two British motorists, Ralph Sleigh and Peter Jopling, drew up outside Shell House in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town, after an epic dash across Europe and Africa. Their route took them across the Sahara and down through Nigeria, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Kenya, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias, Transvaal, the Orange Free State and finally to Cape Town.

They had completed the journey from England in 24 days 2 hours 50 minutes, smashing the previous best time on record by no less than 7 days 19 hours 10 minutes and had also broken the Algiers to Cape Town record by 3 days 20 hours 55 minutes.

Sleigh and Jopling drove an Austin A70 Hampshire Saloon with only two modifications - special auxiliary tanks mounted on the roof and seats designed to recline to become beds. The extra equipment carried on the car weighed slightly more than half a ton, which was a further testimony, were any needed, to the sturdiness of the A70.

The distance overland from Algiers to the Cape was 10,300 miles - four thousand miles further than the sea route because no road existed down the West Coast of Africa and indeed the "roads" in the interior were so bad that Sleigh and Jopling had to head east as far as Nairobi and Mpwapwa.

The previous England to Cape record was 31 days 22 hours, set up by the late Humphrey Symons and Bertie Browning in January 1939. Sleigh and Jopling had previously motored from Algiers to the Cape faster than any other team in the world when, in January 1948, with two companions, John Brown and John Clowes, they made their arduous journey in 24 days 20 hours.

Ralph Sleigh was a 39 year-old ex-Squadron Leader in the RAF and was the Eastern Counties Representative of a firm of paint manufacturers. Peter Jopling was a 29 year old ex-Major in the King's African Rifles and was a Company Director. They first met through an advertisement Sleigh inserted in a daily newspaper when he was seeking companions for his 1948 trip.

During the whole journey the drivers only had three nights rest. The only mechanical hitch was when the Austin's speedometer packed up in the early stages of the Sahara crossing, after the cable had been ripped off by a projecting outcrop of rock. Later, having holed the sump on another rock, the intrepid drivers had to replace it in a raging sand-storm, shielding the engine with blankets.

Advance arrangements had been made for petrol, oil and tyre supplies to be picked up en route at predetermined points, and everything went exactly according to plan.
They were given a great reception in Cape Town, where to everyone's amazement, they appeared to be quite fresh despite their long and strenuous trip during which their schedule had exceeded 450 miles each day through the barren wastes of the Sahara desert and the rain-soaked, rutted tracks of East Africa.

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