The Story of the London to Sydney Marathon
The fastest rally cars in the world drove ten thousand miles in ten days to try to win the £10,000 first prize in the London to Sydney Marathon. The journey took them over the Alps, across the Bosphorus, through the deserts of Iran and Afghanistan to the Khyber Pass and the plains of India.
From Bombay the seventy-two survivors had a ten-day sea voyage to Fremantle before the final three-thousand-mile race through the outback of Australia to the finish at Sydney just before Christmas.
The Marathon proved to be the longest, the toughest-and the most surprising-rally in the history of motor sport, and the first two cars to reach Sydney were Andrew Cowan's Hillman Hunter and Paddy Hopkirk's British Leyland 1800. It was an outright British win. The Marathon was the motoring event of 1968 and Wheelbase covered it all the way.