Racing lines: The ultimate lap… around the world

We all love a road trip, so how about signing up for the ultimate drive, with an added spice of competition?

That’s the premise for the ‘Round the World’ vintage and classic rally, which will start this week – exactly a year from now. A copious spirit of adventure is mandatory – as are the amounts of time and money you’ll have to indulge.

In the best traditions of Phileas Fogg, this 22,000- mile circumnavigation is scheduled to take just 80 days, but split across more than a full year and three legs. “You can choose to do just one,” says Rally the Globe organiser Fred Gallagher. “But we’d love you to do all three.”

Gallagher is a rallying veteran who co-drove for Juha Kankkunen, Ari Vatanen and Björn Waldegard during a stellar career, before turning his hand to organising epic historic rallies. But this lap of the globe is the first such since his friend, the late and much-missed Philip Young, ran one back in 2000. So they don’t happen often.

Vintage and classic cars split into five classes of age are eligible. That means basically anything up to the 1976 cut-off, and Gallagher hopes for a clutch of Edwardian ‘Pioneers’ among the entry.

Crews will gather for the start at Greenwich, site of the Prime Meridian Line, on May 23 2020 for the first leg: a run to Casablanca by 9 June. The rally picks up again in Boston on 19 September and sets aim for Vancouver by 10 October. And the final, mammoth leg starts from Vladivostok, Russia the following May, with crews crossing Siberia, Kazakhstan and northern Europe to make it back to Greenwich by 19 June 2021. Not 80 days in the continuous sense that Fogg or Michael Palin would understand, then, but much more convivial – especially given the fine hotels crews can expect along the route.