Driven to destruction at the Mongol Rally

New York City is well-known for its cramped apartments. So it's surprising that, this summer, David Toal and his wife, Illiana Ivanova, are abandoning their downtown Manhattan dwelling to spend three weeks confined in a rusty red, Eastern European car barely bigger than a bathtub, cruising across Europe and central Asia.

“I just knew that I wouldn't be able to quiet the nagging voice in my head and move on with my life until I had changed a tire during a sandstorm in Uzbekistan,” says Toal, 30, a hotel revenue manager.

He and Ivanova, 29, an architect, are Windmill Giants, one of 200 fancifully named teams (such as Starsky and Clutch and Feersum Endjinn) that convened Saturday in London's lush, green Hyde Park, to drive dented, barely functioning cars across one-quarter of the earth. The cause is the four-year-old Mongol Rally, an odyssey that defies common sense.

“You're only having fun when everything's going wrong,” explains curly-headed, 27-year-old Brit Tom Morgan, who runs the League of Adventurists and masterminded the Mongol Rally. Its premise: teams pilot one-liter-engine autos (think Yugos or Fiats) from London to Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator. Entrants choose their own route and acquire visas before slogging through desolate deserts, chugging up steep mountain ranges and ferrying across deep lakes. To make the undertaking even more formidable, teams are barred from bringing support teams and GPS gizmos, and shouldn't understand the Cyrillic alphabet.

“What's the fun of setting out completely prepared?” asks Morgan, who has seen teams launch with little more than screwdrivers. “Of course, you'll only think that in hindsight.”

The Mongol Rally shares little common ground with other road races, such as the high-speed Gumball Rally (which was canceled this year after several racers were involved in a fatal car accident). There's no official winner in the Mongol Rally, with teams receiving the same reward no matter when they finish: “We'll celebrate with a cold beer at a bar in Ulanbattar,” explains Morgan with a laugh.

For a good cause
The Rally is not all flat tires and foreign terrain: Before racing, teams must raise about $2,000 for charity (the Send a Cow fund, in particular, which assists farmers in sub-Saharan Africa).

Though it's “great to go to a country and experience all this adventure,” Morgan says, “it adds something to the experience to change people's lives.”

Mongolia 1, standard car wheel 0

A life-changing experience led Morgan to launch the Rally. Its origins stem from 2001, when he and a friend tried driving a broken Fiat from Prague to Mongolia. They failed, but Morgan had such a blast that, in 2004, he launched the inaugural, six-team Mongol Rally. The following year 43 teams entered, with 14 finishing — a 33 percent success rate. (Participants were thwarted by cars snapping in half, engines falling out, arrests, being held up at gunpoint and, oddly, beatings by dwarves.) Last year, about half of the 200 teams finished the Rally. Daunting odds, however, have not dampened Rally demand.

This spring, 200 slots were to be released on the Mongol Rally Web site, in batches of 50. Interest was so intense that zero teams entered when enrollment opened.

“Our computer servers melted down,” says Morgan. “I was jumping up and down, slapping my computer and shouting obscenities. We were completely overwhelmed. Selling out in about three seconds was about a week faster than I was thinking.” When registration reopened, the now-available slots were snatched in minutes.

“I guess there are more people out there than I thought who find the 21st century a little bit too safe and boring,” Morgan says of the race's popularity.

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