Harry Metcalfe took his Ferrari Testarossa from England all the way down to the Sahara Desert covering some 2,000 miles on tarmac, and sometimes, quite off of it. Here’s his big adventure.
The inspiration came from a story written twenty years ago:
Back in 1995, Richard Bremner drove a Ferrari 512M all the way from the Ferrari factory to the Sahara desert for Car Magazine. To celebrate this great story, I decided to drive my 1987 Ferrari Testarossa to the Yasmina Hotel next to the Erg Chebbi dunes in the Sahara Desert, the same hotel Richard stayed in twenty years ago.
Now, the list of good things popping into mind about driving through most of Morocco crossing the Atlas Mountains to reach those sand dunes include that fuel is ridiculously cheap there compared to Europe, the locals are all very friendly and “have quite a lot of camel power,” plus you can also meet Sahara-spec Renault 4s along the way, which is always a bonus.
On the other hand, customs can be tricky, there are speed cameras everywhere aimed right at Rosso Corsa cars wearing foreign plates, one side of the mountains is more like a very nasty Welsh rally stage in February and you will run out of tarmac sooner than expected.
Richard Bremner’s 150 km/h average speed was out of the question twenty years later, but the sand remained the same, and the Ferrari did it.
Damn ancient immobilizers. They really are a menace.
Contact the author at mate@jalopnik.com.