Two men recently completed an unimaginable voyage across the continent of Africa driving a Reliant Robin.
Their journey took over 90 days, during which they suffered countless breakdowns, swerved civil unrest and military operations, and witnessed all the beauty of the Colorful Continent.
For the uninitiated, the Reliant Robin was a quirky English car built with only a single front wheel. Designed to be inexpensive and for mainly driving to the store, the Reliant is famous for being the very last thing anyone would want to be reliant on.
Hold My Gear, the Instagram handle for the London-to-Cape Town adventure of “14,000 miles, 3 wheels, 0 common sense” was run by the utterly daft and tenacious duo of Ollie Jenks from the UK and Seth Scott from Canada, the latter proposing the idea to the former.
They would have to travel all those thousands of miles through jungle, deserts, and mountains, through unstable regions covered with the worst roads in the world, all while doing it in a car that can’t be turned sharply without flipping over.
Jenks and Scott bought Sheila, a silver Reliant Robin that was one of the very last to ever be built. It’s owner said it made him nervous driving more than 20 miles in one trip.
“No power steering, no air con, and it doesn’t do well up hills or down them. It is the most unsuitable car for probably any journey,” Jenks told the South China Morning Post.
Nevertheless, they set out across 22 countries from London to Cape Town. In Ghana, their transmission and gear box broke, and had to wait 5 days while Reliant Robin enthusiasts back in the UK found one and shipped it to them, an act of kindness that had to be repeated when their engine exploded later.
As for tires, springs and shocks, gauges—comforts and aesthetics of every description, the number of breakdowns were uncountable—as were the challenges they faced. They were driving through Benin when a military coup took place. In Cameroon they had to be given a military escort along with local buses, all of which eventually abandoned them after they kept breaking down.
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Each day came with its own Instagram video, which make for brilliant, if vulgar, watching.
In day 53, they demonstrated how to handle bribe requests from rural Nigerian police officers by handing them some gas station confectionaries, while in day 89 of their attempt, they performed one of their hilarious jerry rigs—by diverting the windshield wiper fluid pump to spray water directly onto the radiator to cool it down in Namibia when their radiator went.
Their last stop was a showroom for high-end cars in South Africa, where Sheila was the star of the show in her battered body work. She’s now set to rest in peace at the London Transport Museum, where she will have a place of honor befitting the two world records she, along with her whacky drivers, achieved.
WATCH day 14, and then go watch the rest…
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