1989: British Brothers Won Camel Trophy in the Amazon

Bob and Joe Ives pointed a yellow Land Rover One Ten into rainy-season Brazil and came home with Britain's only Camel Trophy.

In March 1989, fourteen two-man national teams gathered at Alta Floresta in Mato Grosso for the tenth Camel Trophy. The route followed the BR-163 corridor toward Santarém, then a barge crossing of the Amazon, and finished in Manaus. The organizers had timed the event for the wet season on purpose.

The dust of the dry season had turned into bottomless red clay. Whole days produced only a few kilometers. One stretch of the convoy managed about 800 meters in twenty-four hours, and that only with heavy winching help. Crews anchored one Land Rover to pull another, dug for half an hour, then fell into the next hole thirty meters later.

Special tasks still decided the result. Bob and Joe Ives, brothers from Hampshire, led Team UK. Across the scored sections they finished five points ahead of the Brazilian home team of Ricardo Simonsen and Alfonso Celso-Baldrati. Belgium's Frank Dewitte and Peter Denys took the Team Spirit Award.

It was the first British win in the event, and it remains the only one. The Royal Automobile Club awarded Bob and Joe Ives the 1989 Segrave Trophy for the Amazon victory, citing the 1,062-mile route from Alta Floresta to Manaus. Their battered One Ten later went on display at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu with the mud, sand ladders, and their names still on the wing.

The Camel Trophy asked amateurs to cross country that trucks already abandoned until the dry season. The Ives brothers answered that ask in Land Rover yellow, and Britain never matched the result again.

True races. Still kicking.