I first met the Sunbeam Tiger in regrettable circumstances back in 1965. I had been competing regularly in the Alpine Rally since winning a coveted Coupe des Alpes with Paddy Hopkirk in 1956 and this rally had become my favourite event, one where British crews had a good success rate against the continental experts.

So the 1965 entry of a powerful prototype Tiger driven by the late, great Peter Harper and navigated by my ex-Rover team colleague Mike Hughes looked like a winner, and duly finished with fewer penalties than anyone else. However, when the organisers stripped the winning engine at post-event scrutiny, they found valves smaller than those officially described for the production cars. Consequently, to the dismay of the British, the entry was sensationally disqualified.

Almost 40 years later, in the summer of 2003, I was invited by Jayne Wignall to navigate her Tiger on the Iberian Classic rally. This new event run by Belgians Robert Rorife and Pierre Barre is the successor to the attractive Rally des Iles about which Jayne wrote in 2002. In place of Sardinia and Corsica we were offered a four day zigzag course through the high Pyrenees followed by two days on the Isle of Mallorca. In total we covered 1,600 miles of scenic interest interspersed with competitive ‘regularity’ sections set on challenging roads where the car must be on the right bit of road at the right time to the exact second to avoid penalties.

The navigation is theoretically easy because the route is described in three substantial route-books where every significant junction is illustrated with a ‘tulip’ diagram showing the way to go. The snags here are two-fold. Firstly, if the navigator is not following the route on a map and happens to miss one ‘tulip’, it is not always possible to regain the route promptly and you can get hopelessly lost. Secondly, there is no information provided about the nature of the road between each ‘tulip’ – it may be straight and fast or it may turn into a series of tight hairpin bends where it will be extremely difficult to maintain even as slow a speed as the 50 kph (31 mph) required. It is not easy to acquire the right detailed maps in advance because the route-books are kept secret until the start.

The event began in Biarritz with a night in the airport Novotel, regrettably less than representative of the Edwardian splendour at the seafront. Jayne had brought the Tiger from Pamplona where only the previous day she had finished the Classic Marathon with Kevin Savage navigating. They had finished third overall on that long competition, and would have been second but for the cancellation of a stage where Kevin had found a junction that many of us missed. So the car was well used with obviously some wear on tyres and breaks. A more serious worry was a broken engine mounting which meant the propshaft was hitting the underneath of the car of left-hand corners.

After lunch on the Andorra border we had a section on the narrow mountain road around the fashionable ski resort of La Molina. This finally dropped us down below the clouds to the coastal hills of Catalunya. Flash floods from the cloudbursts poured a red-brown slurry racing across our path as we saw more than one car drowned out. The Tiger forded them with some confidence, a little water coming in behind our seats. And so to the night halt on the seafront at Lloret de Mar. Once again the organisers held a party dinner, a welcome element of the Rorife style, with the presentation of minor awards to a couple of worthy crews.

At last the weather, whilst scarcely Mediterranean, was largely dry. The roof came off and we cruised on delightful roads before performing regularities on the stages of the Catalunya World Rally Championship, recognisable to those who watch the television coverage. With, by now, badly worn tyres and being unlucky to encounter some local traffic, we just couldn’t hold the speed on four steep, narrow, twisty and sometimes gravel stages, dropping a serious total of two minutes that day. By contrast, the main time controls on the road sections being only at lunch and at the end of the day, Jayne and I found there was always time to spare for a mid-morning coffee halt and a cold drink at tea-time. I found the Tiger luxuriously comfortable, and its ability to accelerate from 40 to 70 in an instant made over-taking, for which I in the left-hand was the spotter, anxiety-free.

Having passed well inland of Barcelona we were returned to the coast for a second seaside night in Pensecola before striking off west into the hills of La Mancha where the countryside was quite different – dry and parched with scarce greenery. Amongst the day’s regularities were two painfully rough sections, one so uncivilised it simply didn’t appear at all on the Michelin map. The Tiger, with its loose engine, suffered agonies and we lost the best part of another minute. Dinner was served at a smart golf club south of Valencia before a late-night drive to the docks to board the overnight ferry to Mallorca.

We landed at dawn and drove to the hotel at Los Pinos, unfortunately located across the island just about as far as it could be from the Palma ferry terminal. Luxurious it was, but I was kept away from the delights, busy once again trying to fit the tulip diagrams to real roads on my maps. The competitive area was all on the third side of the island and we quickly discovered that at the start of October the holiday traffic had not disappeared. For the first time competitors were having trouble trying to reach main road controls on time.

A short extension was agreed and we continued on the morning’s task – a regularity crossing the old pass above the Soller tunnel. My maps revealed a continuous string of hairpins up and down. There was no doubt in my mind – we were in for a flat-out hill-climb. Jayne thought the Tiger could manage the fifteen uphill hairpins if only the road was wide enough. It wasn’t. Jayne drove like the wind, she and the Tiger roaring up the hill in perfect harmony. Once or twice a spurt up a hundred metre straight reduced out lateness to a mere five seconds, but each hairpin seemed to take an age with the Tiger locking round at what felt like walking pace and not accelerating away until all the wheels were straight. It was a magnificent, which pulled us up from a poor position to a place inside the top ten. The remaining regularity that afternoon was virtually abandoned due to density of traffic, but not before a green Triumph TR3 had been hit by some young British tourists driving a hire car on the wrong side of the road.

The final day’s entertainment was a couple of laps round a large convoluted kart-racing track on the opposite side of the island, again requiring another 100 mile drive there and back. That day was the first totally blue-sky day, the view from the grandstand was excellent with only one chicane hidden from view, and the café was open and working well. Drivers and navigators went to extreme lengths to detect where the timing points might be, and to plot how to get their cars to each exactly on time.

This frolic had little effect on the final results, which were kept secret until the reverse-order prize giving took place at the ceremonial dinner. We may have been only ninth but there was another Tiger crewed by the antipodeans Peter Lloyd and Suzanne May with Skippy, the inflatable kangaroo. They upheld the honour of the marque by finishing a splendid third overall. Many congratulations to them.

Willy Cave October 2003