This feature-length documentary film covers the 2022 East African Safari Rally though the eyes of the team at Tuthill Porsche. This was the year that Ken Block would take part in the event, the endurance rally adding to his extensive experience in various motorsport disciplines.
The film takes on a less jovial and far more somber note now due to the sudden death of Block in a snowmobile accident on the 2nd of January 2023. His untimely death sent shockwaves across the automotive world leaving his friends and family devastated. His daughter Lia Block has taken up his mantle, and over the past few years has become a world class rally driver in her own right.
Ken was a driver who had a unique appeal to people from all sides of the automotive world, and was well-liked in the vintage car community, the JDM scene, the related worlds of rally and rallycross, not to mention autocross, hillclimb racing, and stunt driving. Very few (if any) drivers have had that kind of cross-genre appeal in the famously tribal automotive world.
Ken Block and his co-driver Alex Gelsomino set a blistering pace in the rally, they were leading at the end of the first day and they won the Special Stage 3.
Block raced with Tuthill Porsche in the event for 2022, the East African Safari Rally had been postponed from November 2021 to February 2022 due to Covid, and the Tuthill team were clearly in high spirits to be back in Africa contesting the event.
This film covers all of the drivers who took part in the event for Tuthill Porsche, a combination of professional-level rally racers and gentleman drivers, who are clearly all there to take part in what is one of the world’s most challenging endurance rally events.
The rally was first held in 1953, known then as the East African Coronation Safari as a celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Ken was a talented rally driver who had competed in FIA World Rally Championship and the FIA World Rallycross Championship, and so he had taken to endurance rallying like a fish to water.
There are spoilers ahead so if you aren’t already familiar with the results of the event please stop reading now. Block and his co-driver Alex Gelsomino would have their car badly damaged by an unseen hole in the road, this would spell the end of their chances at winning the event, though it didn’t stop them throwing everything they had into it after the car had been repaired.
Tuthill Porsche is based near Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. It’s a family business that’s been operating for over 35 years, and they’ve developed a global reputation for building bespoke high-performance Porsche road cars and preparing Porsches for motorsport competition.
If you’d like to read more about Tuthill Porsche you can visit their website here.
Images courtesy of Tuthill Porsche
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
