To what extent has motorsport influenced the choices of ordinary car buyers in Kenya’s motoring history?JL
Motorsport is, by definition, a contest between two or more parties to establish which is better at a specified objective. So, when the first car to reach Kenya arrived in 1904, there was no one to compete with. The prime opponent was ignorance – of how to assemble it, how to fuel it, how to start it, how to drive it. No one knew.
When the second car arrived, there was an immediate rivalry, and almost certainly some sort of side-by-side “contest”. To keep that word in perspective, bear in mind the first recorded race down one fairly long and straight street was started with a gunshot. Having fired, the starter got on a bicycle and went to the finishing line to flag in the winner. And he had to wait for them to arrive.
By the time there were dozens of cars, there were inevitably random challenges, and when there were several hundred vehicles these were organised into formal and multiple-entrant competitions.
Individual owners were competing for bragging rights. Independent onlookers were hungry for a way to assess the relative merits of different makes and models.
Because early cars were so temperamental, the most popular early events were called “reliability trials” – just getting around the course of several miles “without stopping” was a good result, and getting around it sooner than everyone else was a win.
As vehicle technology improved, and numbers rose, more inventive challenges were designed and we got formal “motorsports” ranging from economy runs to hill climbs... and races, at speeds a modern bicycle might have contested.
So, the answer to your question up to that point was that motorsport was not only “influential”, but it was also the biggest influence on buyer choice...because it was almost the only comparative measure of reliability and performance.
An ingredient of “prestige” was the predominant “other” marketing tool. Adverts simply listed the names of the people who had purchased a particular model. Lord and Lady XYZ have bought a Ponce Drop-head Coupe blah blah blah...
Rally sport was not yet on the menu perhaps because it would be no more informative or exciting than any up-country trip which that era might have called “ordinary motoring”!
As the vehicle population rose to several thousand between the Wars, cars became much more reliable and more standardised and consumers had a steadier database for their choice, the role of motorsport became less dominant.
Rallying may have been in its infancy, but it did not tell consumers much that they did not already know. But rallying truly exploded to prominence with a one-off event designed purely to commemorate the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952/53.
The Coronation Safari Rally. Over the next 40 years that became the East African Safari, then The Marlborough Safari then simply, The Safari.
To start with, and for many years, the Safari was contested by standard cars, driven by private and amateur crews and teams. It was immediately recognised as the “toughest” rally in the world, attracted enormous global attention, and gave Kenyan car buyers a fresh and compellingly meaningful platform for assessment of which brand does best in local conditions.
Safari results and brand sales trends each year were a mirror image! First VW, then Mercedes, then Ford, then Peugeot, then Nissan, then Toyota went from the winner’s rostrum to the top of the charts.
That pattern was remarkably consistent for 30 years but has since (not completely) waned, as the cars on the ramp got more and more different from the cars in the showroom, as the ethos of the event itself was progressively castrated by the demands of television coverage and works team design and budget formulae, and the Kenya market itself was transmogrified by a massive shift (90 percent!) from new to used vehicle supply. Our vehicle supply is predominantly used cars which were chosen as “new” by customers in a different part of the world.
In parallel, the local motor industry itself has changed dramatically in its captaincy; in glib-speak, the trade hitherto led predominantly by hands-on technically savvy petrol-heads with a marketing mantra of “watch this”, gave way to business savvy number-crunchers with more cosmetic advertising strategies.
And the Safari itself has changed from a round-the-clock open-road marathon (Kenya’s metier) to a closed-circuit daylight-only sprint (not our forte).
The winners of this year’s event will have global publicity, will be admired, and will greatly excite motorsport fans. Kenya will benefit enormously and, in many ways, other than motoring from this worldwide showcase. But none of that will tell today’s ordinary car buyers anything they do not already know.
