Tuesday 11th February 2025

An Unlikely Navigator 

I am an American ex-pat who moved to England for love in 2022.

As a painter who mostly stares at the sky when I'm travelling, I was dubious when my husband Peter Barker asked me if I’d like to navigate for him on the 2025 Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique. He said that all we had to do was not come in last. As I love classic cars and roller coasters, and can read in the car without getting sick, I resolved to give it a try

As the event loomed closer, we bought a road book. I practiced my tulip navigation. Peter Baker (who shall henceforth be referred to as Pierre Boulanger to avoid confusion), Editor-in-Chief of Retro-Speed Magazine, agreed to help us out. He talked Clive Berry into joining him, so we had a top-notch service crew.

We trailered the car and made our way to Reims in a persistent winter drizzle. At the Parc des Expositions, we drove our little Triumph Herald Coupe into a parking space, collected our rally plates and stickers and began plastering them all over the car. I enjoyed wandering about looking at the other cars and drivers and hearing the variety of languages.

The morning of the official start, Pierre Boulanger pulled me aside to go over where and when our service stops for the day would be scheduled. This became the routine for the remainder of the rally. We strapped in and went over the first few turns in our minds as we inched toward the start.

Finally, we rolled up the ramp. A lady thrust a bottle of Champagne through our window in a yellow arrow-shaped tin. The marshal counted us down for the Concentration Run, I took a deep breath and began to navigate for real as the car rolled down the ramp.

We drove overnight to Dole. Next morning the weather was mostly sunny. The French countryside rolled by starkly beautiful in its winter dress - wan green with amber pastures and vineyards, bare trees showing their gnarled skeletons in the low country, the rich deep green of the pines at higher altitudes. The land itself is similar to parts of the American Southwest, with tall, stratified ridges of limestone alternating tortured volcanic domes. The roads wound excitingly through ancient French villages built from tawny limestone blocks.


The first stage over the Col de l’Echarrasson was spectacular. We rode over ridges dodging through fingers of mist and sunlight creating a sparkling winter landscape, tiptoed over the lingering patches of slick frost in pools of shadow.


Later in the rally, as we drove from St Bonnet le Froid in the Ardeche, we were treated one of the most spectacular sunsets I have experienced. Illuminated arabesques of pink cloud laced themselves through the curving hills, stands of pine, and intricate rock formations. I had 30 seconds to enjoy it before I had to get my head down again and call the next turn.
The Mountain circuit on the last night was the most exciting of the sections. It began for us at 10.34pm, with a quarter-moon grinning down from the sable heavens, Venus alongside. We had got lost trying to exit Monaco - the one place where our normally excellent roadbook let us down completely. Eventually we emerged from the maze of baffling junctions and got back on the rally route.

The Col de Turini started with an arduous uphill, and as usual we were passed by more powerful cars. We came into our own on the downhill and took great pleasure in whizzing past those same cars in our nimble little Herald. Peter drove a beautiful line, and the car sounded positively muscular as it wound around the tight hairpins, the transmission whining and growling as we downshifted into the turns and powered along the straights. Spectators clustered at curves, sometimes half-blinding us with their flash photos. We managed not to mow any of them down. It was fun and exciting to cut in tight, to see the rock walls whizzing past the windows, the heart-stopping breathlessness of passing a competitor. We laughed together over the absurdity of some of the landmarks as I called them out: “How the hell am I going to find a tree with three red stripes in a forest at midnight?” But we did it, and I almost never called out a left hairpin when I meant right.


Our final placing was 172. We had moved up a total of nine places on our seeding and didn’t come last at all!