NJENGA: Local sports icons should write memoirs to document

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In Summary

Colin Steele McRae, the first youngest ever FIA World Rally champion, signs off his biography, The Real McRae with deep reflection and satisfaction of his third Safari Rally title in 2002.

“I had my third Safari win. It was my 25th World Rally Championship (WRC), then the highest number by a single driver, in all and giving me the WRC record outright,” he writes.

“Our second consecutive victory (Safari) and the non-finishes had lifted us from nowhere to second place in the championship. Was this event really worth being in the championship?

“It was great to have that distinction but, more satisfying still, to have put me firmly in contention,” writes the first British World Rally Champion who died in a helicopter crash together with his son in 2007 just outside his hometown of Lanark in Scotland. His five-year-old son Johnny, the boy's six-year-old friend Ben Porcelli and Graeme Duncan, 37, also died in the crash.

McRae was no ordinary driver. He was fast, ambitious, meticulous, and at age 27 became the youngest driver to win the WRC driver’s title and handed Britain its first silverware in the history of the sport.

The book is a quick read, a bare it all personal relationship with fellow competitors, team bosses and, a reflection of his rise from obscurity to stardom to rank amongst the highest paid sports stars of his generation with a nest at celebrity playgrounds in the Principality of Monaco.

His family’s past notwithstanding as son of Jim McRae, the five-time British Rally champion, McRae‘s rise is a case study of every budding rally driver. One can start small, always eyeing the finishing line, followed by improvement in class wins, then section times. It is from here one starts getting noticed, best illustrated by the gradual rise of Eric Bengi with a career-best 5th in the 2018 Africa Rally Championship Safari locally.

The British ace has very kind words for the Safari which he gives a rating of nine out of 10 in his all-time favourites.

“As I have already explained, I’d like it to be restored to an extended format without pace notes, but still stands on its own with its long stretches and, of course, its wildlife.

“Again it is rough, again it is a potential car-breaker, but the setting and atmosphere in Kenya make it unique. The speed helps counter the heat but you may need a snorkel to survive the water crossings.
McRae explains his near close shave with giraffe, zebra, and ostrich. “The best near miss we had was when we ended up under a giraffe. We came around a corner, through a bush and the big fella was just standing there, straddling the road. We stopped right beneath its belly.”

McRae made his Safari debut in 1993 in a 900CC Subaru Vivio, a tiny ant he crashed to smithereens, ending on its belly after the wheels came off before returning in 1996 with the Group Subaru Impreza.

He eventually conquered the Safari in 1997 in a World Rally Car Subaru Impreza, a car he and fellow teammate Italian Piero Latti helped develop to an all-conquering machine of which the chassis 001 original was three years ago sold for Sh30 million to a collector in an auction aged 20 years.

“It was thanks to the many hours Mcrae and the other drivers spent at its wheel, that when it came to the car’s debut at Rally Monte Carlo in January 1997, Latti was able to claim victory and help Subaru go on and win a third consecutive manufacturers’ title,” David Richards, the head of Prodrive which developed the car of which only 130 were ever built in proper WRC trim, said.

In 2008 1,100 Subaru owners gathered in Lanark and proceeded to Prodive factory in Marwick, 48km away to honour McRae, They wrote his name in a formation before sounding off with the famed Subaru Twak, Twak Subaru turbo booster nuisance sound.

The book is also a challenge to Kenyan sportsmen, none with the exception of Paul Tergat have a memoir to their names.

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