Volkswagen Touareg Reaches Southern Tip of Africa in Record Time

Great challenges for car and team en route from the North Cape in Norway to Cape Agulhas in South Africa

As in the early hours of 21st September he set off from the North Cape (Norway) for the southern tip of South Africa, the primary goal of this latest project for long-distance record holder Rainer Zietlow from Mannheim was to test out the robustness of his Volkswagen Touareg. The journey was involuntarily interrupted by an accident caused by another driver. Following a workshop stop in Tanzania, East Africa, he and his team nevertheless reached Cape Agulhas yesterday evening in record time.

The German adventurer, who with his Volkswagen Touareg also holds the world records on the Pan-American Highway and the eastern Melbourne-St. Petersburg axis, has thus also set the new long-distance record for this route through Europe and Africa. At 21 days, 16 hours and 36 minutes, he beat the time of 28 days, which was last set as the world record in 1984. If you take away the time for the repair, the trip of around 17,000 kilometres was actually covered in just 8 days, 10 hours and 26 minutes.

Zietlow and his co-drivers Marius Biela and Matthias Prillwitz were perfectly on time when on the sixth day of the journey they were involved through no fault of their own in an accident in Tanzania. “Nobody was injured, but when I saw the car, I thought we’d have to give up,” recalls Zietlow. “However, it soon became clear in the garage that the engine and gearbox had remained intact – so we still wanted to see what we could achieve.” Using Volkswagen original parts, the mechanics in Tanzania were able to repair the Touareg for the final stage from Inringa, where the accident occurred, to Cape Agulhas.

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