If one had to sum up the essential ingredients of the fascination of the long-distance rally or trial, it is in the Australian’s national characteristic of ‘having a go’.

Why else, one ponders, would otherwise sane men and women strap themselves with one or two companions into a motor vehicle for the privilege of sitting in an increasing murk of dirt, body order, wet socks, lolly wrappings and sand flies.

In a motor vehicle that becomes a creaking, bouncing, jangling, jitney of hurt, that crashes over the unending bumps and corrugations, shakes the fillings out of the back teeth, dies in the middle of river crossings and after a while won’t steer straight on bitumen.

For the privilege of being so tired that death would be welcome, of straining red, stinging eyes through a smeared windscreen up a slimy, muddy, snow-edged road through the Australian Alps with the seconds ticking away and the navigator screaming ‘go-go-go’ and slamming a hand on the dash and the car sliding always towards the blackness over the edge and a 200 metre drop into nothing and a five day beard itching and one’s piles are on fire.

Why? Why?

The answer to that is the same as a grand prix racing driver will give when you ask him why he races. He will say ‘because there are all those cars waiting around to be raced, and if I don’t do it someone else will.’

Rally crews, Trial crews – categorise them how you will – are among the last of the human race who challenges the technology and the machine and the elements and the limits of human endurance because it is fun, and it is naughty and it is exciting in a world where the urban animal has been dialled and computed and cosseted into the security of bureaucratically ordered environment.

That is why!!