The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge 2007 is an adventure-rally in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the first-ever trans-continental motor-marathon.

It is a timed, sporting event with comprehensive route instructions provided to clearly define the route. Cars will clock in at checkpoints in towns and villages along the way to establish a leader-board and results. Those in the Pioneer category do not have to run the same average-speeds as a Vintageant, and we don’t expect a Bentley to keep up with a Fifties car… but, all drive the same common route.

On Sunday May 27th 2007, the flag will fall at the start of a celebration of a remarkable birthday. The pioneers who ventured out 100 years ago had no known roads for the first 5,000 miles, so no maps, no petrol stations, and no mechanics placed at points along the way. Nobody expected them to survive the course and nobody in any authority would assist. There was nothing to help guide their navigation, other than keeping the sun on their backs as a way of ensuring they must be going north. Once you hit the trans-Siberian railway line - and there’s the Gobi Desert to cross before finding that - well, all you do is count down the telegraph poles to Moscow. Simple, really. Except it is 1907, and nobody has been much further down the road than the next town. Race you across two Continents? Some challenge!

Now, 100 years later, it’s going to happen again.

Our route will be totally authentic, in terms of driving conditions and places visited, taking cars northwards through the Great Wall of China, through the Gobi Desert into Outer Mongolia, crossing the Steppes and vast grassy plains of Asia, into Russia and southern Siberia and on to Moscow.... then it’s northwards to St. Petersburg, and on into Europe to a party in Paris. Prince Borghese and the four other rivals of 1907, who set out to prove that “man and machine can now drive anywhere,” were so confident that frontiers could be rendered meaningless they set about a journey packed with so many adventures they gripped the attention of newspaper readers worldwide.

In magnitude, the achievements of the 1907 rally-drivers captured public imaginations as much as Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon for the very first time. It seemed brash, rash and impossible. No other drive had been quite like it... travel around the world could only be done by ship and it’s been that way for centuries. Put it all into perspective: A heavier-than-air flying-machine was to take a further two years before man could fly the 21 miles of the English Channel. When young Bleriot circled Dover Castle to touch down in the paddock in 1909, he was carried off to a posh lunch organised by the Editor of the Daily Mail propped up on crutches with two broken legs - not from the bumpy landing, but from an earlier practice-flight just learning the ropes. Unless you were reckless as well as stupid, you simply didn’t try to go far with a combustion-engine under your toes and a gas-tank under your backside.

In the hallowed halls of the RAC Club in Pall Mall, the announcement of a daring drive across Asia and Europe - motoring the greatest distance on earth between two capital cities - was put down as so daft, so ludicrous, no Englishman could possibly contemplate such an undertaking. It was hard enough trying to drive from London to Brighton. Just think of the punctures we all get climbing out of Crawley! And, it would take attention away from the opening of the World’s first motor-racing circuit at Brooklands. British drivers who showed any interest in shipping a car to China were given strong discouragement, underlined by The Autocar declaring it to be nothing more than a publicity stunt doomed to failure.

We intend to do everything possible to make the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge a memorable drive on roads that enhance the pleasure of driving an older car... dodging trucks and hammering down miles of dull tarmac is therefore a very last resort. And that’s a pledge from every member of the Organisation. Where we skip a page from the history-books, it’s simply to offer more vistas of unchanging views through the windscreen, more challenging roads, lonelier, wilder corners of the planet, in conditions that Prince Borghese and his mates relished.

Out of China and out of the Gobi Desert, and once into Mongolia, our planned route turns west at Ulaan Baatar, and drives across the grassy plains and vast prairies first rallied by the chariots of Genghis Khan. We will be camping in areas where there is nothing, supported by the same well-oiled logistical team that arranged hot meals, a few civilised comforts, and a fuel-tanker at the foot of Mount Everest for our crossing of Tibet on the 1997 Peking to Paris.

We drive into Russia and steer north-west to Moscow – take in a rest-stop, and then set out for St. Petersburg, the reckless off-route diversion that so tempted Prince Borghese in 1907 with his seven-litre Itala, which by now was running so faultlessly he dared to accept the invitation of a further long drive in order to let his hair down at a lavishly-organised party. You don’t get to come this way too often, he said, “the opposition are a long way behind so we’ll risk it - and still be first to the champagne.” We drive up to St. Petersburg, for exactly the same mad reasoning as the first Prince of motoring. And we continue onward to Paris.

Survivors who reach Paris will sit down to a prize-giving gala-dinner in the sumptuous splendour of the Continental la Grand Hotel, on Saturday night, June 30th, 2007. Gold medals and silver trophies for the finishers will make it a party to remember. This for sure promises to be one amazing, riotous evening. Prince Borghese and his foe Charles Goddard will be cheering from their graves at the way we celebrate their brave audacity - which once again inspires a rare bunch of drivers to storm the adventure-roads that run all the way from Peking to Paris.