How Zululand’s Hestertjie became a tough rally car

What do you do if you have only ever wanted to be a rally driver?

You buy a 33-year-old Fiat, drive it 1 349km across the country to Vosburg in the Northern Cape and enter the Bull Run.

That is what three Zululanders did recently.

Tonie (Kole) Nell, Hendrik (Frikkadel) Boshoff and Willem (Figgie) Dippenaar drove a 1980 Fiat 131 Mirafiori all the way to a farm between Britstown and Carnarvon, and spent two days racing other old cars on the surface of a dried-up saltpan.

The event is called The Bull Run and it is a rally with a difference.

For starters, your rally car should be 30 years or older.

It must preferably be a four-door sedan and not worth more than R15 000.

And to make a good first impression, you must arrive at the event in a cloud of dust – sideways!

Kole, Frikkadel and Figgie went to the Bull Run in Hestertjie, so-called because she was a wedding gift from Zululand Observer columnist, Dirk Rezelman to his wife Hester, way back in 1980.

Coincidentally the Fiat 131 was the world rally champion car in the same year, but that car had a 2.0-litre engine and Hestertjie is a 1600, though a very high-revving one with a set of twin Webbers.

Quarter-mile drag race

The Bull Rally was first held in 2011 and apart from being a crazy non-stop party, it also comprises a series of time trial events in which the 50 vintage cars are raced, drifted and generally abused over a period of two days.

Donuts and spin-outs are the order of the day, with cars and drivers disappearing and re-appearing from within storms of dust.

Vehicles get categorised by their engine sizes and given a handicaps accordingly, but in the end nobody really cares for the points because they are all there just to have fun.

The highlight of the Bull Rally is the quarter-mile drag race, where drivers challenge each other in a one-on-one battle.

There it is all about bragging rights as the smaller cars try to beat the big V6s and V8s.

Hestertjie’s claim to fame is that she went all the way to Vosburg via the Eastern Cape, ran with the bulls and drove back to Richards Bay without a hitch.

That is if you disregard the speeding ticket in Maclear and the clapping from the exhaust caused by overloading.