Peking to Paris in a '69 VW Beetle
Interview with Gernold Nisius

 

 

Gernold Nisius:  I read a book about the race and decided that's something I should do. I then  went to their website and found out there was a category where people offer cars for sale or their services as a navigator and a mechanic.  I decided to do the same and then within a few weeks, I had numerous inquiries from people looking for a navigator and mechanic. This all happened  two years prior to the 2010 rally. The whole preparation took almost two years. And they can only have a rally like this every this every three years at a minimum.

 

 

GN: That's what it takes them to prepare the route. It's the longest vintage long-distance rally anywhere. There really is no winning at the end because when you get to Paris  there's too many different classes. You've got cars that start in 1907 up to the newest cars built in 1968. Making it to Paris for me was everything. It's almost like running the Paris-Dakar without any support. There is really no overall winner and to many different classes and to me everybody that made it to Paris was a winner. You're in the car, two people, you've got it packed up with everything you need. They have three support vehicles called Sweepers; they come from the back and if you broke down, they stop and they've got a few spares and tools and they're there to help you, but they're not required to get you going or to tow you or anything. So you're pretty much on your own. If your car breaks down and you can't get it going again, the rally leaves the next day,  and you sit there. That makes it pretty stressful.

 

 

GN: Actually, it was registered in California as a `69 Beetle, but they allowed it in the end because it was all prepared. But `68 is really where they cut it off; they don't want anything newer.

 

 

 

GN: We were pretty lucky in the Beetle. We had very few problems. We broke the roll bar in the car from all the rattles. Once it didn't run right in the Mongolian desert, but we fiddled with it for two hours and got it going again; I could never really figure out why it wouldn't run. We had a similar experience later in the rally and my take was a electrical fault in the wiring somewhere. But that had been a real tough day as far as the road conditions  -- all washboard. We came in after the maximum allowed lateness, and so we got the whole day scrapped. We essentially lost our standing that day. We were leading that class up until then, and after that we lost what was called the Gold Standard.

 

 

GN: The Beetle was completely restored. Garrick Staples who owned the car already had done most of the work and he did a very good job for a amateur mechanic. He lives in the L.A. area. I went there three or four times for a week to spend time with the car, just looking it over, but most of it was rebuilt. It had a few changes, like a full roll bar, Porsche seats, GPS system, different suspension --  almost like a Baja race car where the shocks come right through the body into the roll bar.

 

 

GN: I didn't have any problem. I'm physically very fit.  Of course, the better shape you are in, the better it is.

 

 

 

GN: Yes. The entry fee for one car is $50,000. Garrick paid for it.

 

 

GN: Other than Mongolia and I think one or two camps in the "Stan" countries, we always had very good hotels. We went to eleven countries. The rally organizer picked some of the best hotels they could find.  The organizer thought it was always important to have the cars safely secured.  

 

 

GN: Mongolia was the best part of it. We were there for nine days. It's just a wide-open country.

 

 

 

GN: Yes, the emphasis of the rally is to break the car. They don't want you to make it to Paris; they made sure we used the lousiest roads they can find. If there is a good road, we're not on it. That's how that works.  

 

 

GN: I think ninety-five made it out of the one hundred and seven cars that started. 

 

 

GN: Yeah, it is. Everybody is trying to somehow get this thing to Paris. I found out after the rally that one couple flew their car from someplace in Mongolia to Kazakhstan in a plane for $30,000! The car broke and they wanted to gain some time to fix the car and get going again. There were all kinds of other dramas. Cars broke down; people had no way to get a part and so they had parts flown into different countries by friends. Some of these cars were very valuable. There was a 1935 Bentley Speed Six; it's a million-dollar car.

  

 

  

GN: It also did very well. That car was actually in the rally before; the owner spent $200,000 preparing it for the rally.

 

 

GN: This is a real rich man's game. But most of the people with these cars, they have enough disposable income. There was very few people hanging on like I did, just as a navigator and mechanic, who spent ten, fifteen thousand dollars, which is not that much if you think about it for six weeks. But some of these people with these cars, they have enough money. 

 

 

GN: That Itala had been there in 2007. An English couple, David and Karen Ayre, found that car by accident on some farm.  For years, they didn't know really what it was until they discovered that a sister car actually won this rally. So they changed it around, made it look exactly like that car that won in 1907. Of course, the rally organization liked that, and that's why you constantly see pictures of that car.

 

 

GN: Yeah, they were really dressed for the role -- the whole outfit. They had the leather boots, with laces up to their knees. They are a really nice couple and I really liked them a lot.

 

 

GN: They did very well. That's a very tough car.  Most of the older cars made it through, but  there was plenty of repairs on the side of the road. A lot of cars lost all kinds of suspension parts and needed constant repairs. Every night right after you came to the hotel or to the camp, you worked on the car.  We were pretty lucky because the Beetle is a durable car and it didn't really need that much and it's very simple. You open the rear deck and you look at the engine, there's not much there.

 

 

 

GN: Oh, it's a pretty small car. There wasn't much there. You can't carry all that much. That's why we pretty much lived with one outfit or two maximum - you wash one, you wear the other.  RailRiders came in handy!

   

 

GN: In Mongolia, we did about two hundred miles a day and in the other countries, sometimes three, four hundred.

 

 

GN: The whole rally is described in three books that look like a Sears catalog. The organization of this rally is phenomenal.  Every inch of the day is mapped out and timed with the trip meter, and you can follow it and its 99.99 percent accurate. So if you follow your books and know how to operate your GPS you never really get lost. 

 

 

GN: No, but what was mandatory was a satellite phone - they introduced that in 2007 because in the first modern rally, I think in 1997, they had people getting lost; they couldn't find them for three days.  

   

 

GN: Oh, yeah, everywhere we went there were interviews, especially the smaller Stan countries, which for them was a big deal. There were kids on the road waving.  

 

 

GN: One day we crossed the border into Russia and due to the formalities and with three hundred people crossing the border, we caused a lot of hiccups there.  So crossing into Russia took about six hours. We left the border that day at 4:00 pm and had 550 Miles to go to the next hotel. We got there at 2:30 am and left again at 7:00 am the next morning.

 

 

GN:  One Bentley got in an accident right in the beginning in China. Another car got in a pretty bad accident in Turkey in the fog.  He went straight instead of taking a right bend, and the car went straight down the hill for two hundred feet.

 

 

GN: They had to bring in a backhoe to get the car out of the ditch. It was totaled. 

 

 

GN: They were okay, but they were shocked, really shocked.  They were lucky because the hill flattened out in the bottom, so they kind of rolled out of it.  

 

 

GN:  I'm German. I came here when I was thirty years old. Your motor sports is totally different here. It's all geared to this country and if you want to watch people go around a circle. I'm not a fan of that.   

 

 

GN:  I've hiked in the altitude in Nepal. I've been to New Zealand for a whole month motorcycling with a friend. I've been planning a motorcycle trip to Alaska.

 

Gernold arriving in Paris in style-- and in his RailRiders clothing after 9,000 miles on the road.