Chasing Ghosts

Recreating old rally routes in our backyard with the GLE 43 AMG Coupe

- Sirish Chandran

THE BRIEF WAS SIMPLE, FIND NEW DRIVING routes. The car was also a no-brainer, something that blended motorsport heritage but with the go-anywhere chops to deal with unknown roads — which in India usually means no roads. And so it was that I found myself with the keys to the black Mercedes-AMG GLE 43 Coupe and a bunch of dog-eared road books from the old MASA rally days. The task? To find some of those old rally routes which, by their very definition, will be ideally suited to belting a fast car over.

You will be forgiven if MASA doesn’t ring a bell. It has been years since they did a national championship rally but back in the day, the MASA rally used to be among the most popular in West India. In fact the Mumbai Pune region used to be a major centre of all kinds of motorsport: racing, rallying, motocross, everything. In the eighties the Himalayan Rally started off in Mumbai before heading to Pune to take in the old MASA stages, and then moving north to Delhi and then the Himalayas. One of those rally cars was the legendary Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC that was to be driven by the Kenyan ace Joginder Singh, but his pace in reconnaissance so unnerved his co-driver Albert Pfuhl that the latter took over the ’wheel — being the owner of the car allowed Pfuhl to pull rank.