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"Joginder Singh, the Lion of Kenya, has passed away in London at the age of 81. &amp;quot;The Flying Sikh,&amp;quot; as he would come to be known, was perhaps the most successful, consistent driver ever seen in African rally racing. If your mental image of the quintessential rally driver is a laconic Finn with ice-water in his veins, you may wish to change it to this: dark-eyed, a neatly trimmed beard, turbaned, destined to race. Born amongst the bright green tea-fields of Kericho in Eastern Kenya, in the highlands west of the Kenyan Rift Valley, Singh immediately found himself surrounded by cars. His family owned a garage, and there he found a first job. He fetched and carried tools, wrenching on the smaller tasks himself. He was soon up to his elbows in the innards of some Ford or Volvo laid low by the challenging African climate. It was an upbringing that would give him an almost preternatural connection to the automobile, an ability to sense when you could push a car and when you needed to hold back. It served him well when he started entering and winning the local rallies. When Singh moved up to the 3-4000 mile, incredibly gruelling East African Safari Rally (later simply the Safari Rally), he wasn&amp;#039;t just battling other drivers. Instead of pure head-to-head competition between teams, the race turned into a war between the unforgiving landscape and the struggling drivers. In 1963, eighty-four cars, including a new Nissan factory-supported effort, headed out on the route that would take them through Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Nairobi. The rains came early that year, churning the red African earth into a sticky mud, gumming up wheel wells and providing about as much traction as a sheet of ice. Only seven cars ended up finishing - a 90% attrition rate - and the factory Nissans weren&amp;#039;t among them. Singh was though, and he managed it in a Fiat. In 1965, he and his brother entered the unlucky 13th year of the rally in a tired old leftover Volvo PV 544 with over 44,000 miles of competition already under its belt. They were allotted first position, meaning that they were first over the course and didn&amp;#039;t have the advantage of other cars clearing the course of loose gravel. It was also supposed to be terribly unlucky number for a car to carry. It didn&amp;#039;t make any difference. Singh and his younger brother Jaswant kicked the ass of factory-prepped teams from Citro\u00EBn, Mercedes, and Saab, leading the pack the whole way in their battered old Volvo. The rains came early again in 1968, and yet again the unsinkable Singh battled through to take his place among the magnificent seven who managed to complete the race. Over the course of twenty-two consecutive rallies, he got to the finish nineteen times and won the event three times, the second time giving the Mitsubishi Lancer its inaugural rally victory. He was the first Sikh driver to ever win an international rally, the first man to take the Safari Rally championship three times, and while he was later surpassed in total wins by the Ugandan-born Shekhar Mehta, his dogged consistency is unmatched. He died of heart failure on Sunday, the date celebrated in the Kenyan calendar as Mashujaa Day, Swahili for &amp;quot;Heroes.&amp;quot; His body, to be cremated in the Sikh tradition, is in London. His spirit, I&amp;#039;d like to think, has returned to its African home. Simba ya Kenya: the Lion of Kenya. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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