RtG Japan Daily Dispatch - day00 - Flipbook - Page 54
Day 28: Aso to Fukuoka, 16 October 2025
Photos: gerardbrown.co.uk
No strangers to the podium, Graham and
Marina Goodwin today clinched their first
Marathon win, after trading places with Manuel
and Irene Dubs for much of the last month.
Graham climbed down from his signature Bentley,
to proclaim “This is a 100-year-old car and we love
it. He’s called Pyman and he’s been brilliant. We’ve
had a fantastic time, and this has been a great rally.
Japan has exceeded all of our expectations; the food, the
culture, and the people have all been brilliant”.
Marina added “you should never give up, even when
you’ve f***d up on day 3 with the wrong speed tables!”
From ditch jumping in Suffolk, to winning in Japan, Nigel
and Sally Woof have, after a month of hard competition,
joined the pantheon of greats with their first Marathon
victory. Appropriately enough they were driving a Japanese
Datsun 240Z. Nigel was quick to explain that he “couldn’t
have brought this car and not given it his very best shot”.
Sally said “We’ve been playing Snakes and Ladders with
the leaderboard because it took us some time to learn about
the car, but eventually we got into the groove and winning
the competition is just the icing on a fantastic cake”.
Nigel’s appraisal of the event was “there’s been a great
crowd of people here, there have been some great roads
and great landscapes. And, as expected, Rally the Globe did
a great job for us and everybody else.” Sally confirmed “that
it was challenging for both the driver and the navigator,
and we’ve seen some really beautiful scenery. We’ve seen
Japan from the top to the bottom in a pretty unique way,
and that alone makes it all worthwhile”. She also revealed
that a chance encounter with a fortune-telling machine had
prewarned her of the victory with the words “examinations,
many years of effort, will bear fruit at last”.
Over dinner Rally Director, Fred Gallagher, was in a
reflective mood and cast his mind back to the great roads,
“along with some sensational gravel in Hokkaido. Japan
has shown us its amazing culture and has been a fantastic
country to travel through. In places, it was extraordinary to
think that the earth was actually smouldering beneath us,
and this has been the most wonderful group of people to
share it with.”
He thanked our amazing Into Japan team: Aya, Naomi,
Akiko, Jack, Sally, Jamie, Mr Mizuno and Mr Nemoto and
acknowledged the invaluable support of the office team
back in the UK.
Mark Appleton and Loren Price took over to deal with
the serious business of handing out the awards, including
the discretionary Spirit of the Rally award that went to
Tricia Field and Susan Godfrey and their big Bentley and
the Against all Odds trophy scooped up by Michael Lutolf
and Patt Henderson for nursing their pretty Citroen to the
very end.
Winners: Nigel and Sally Woof
Graham and Marina Goodwin
Manuel and Irene Dubs, 1940 Ford Coupe
Pierre Gerber and Alice Leuenberger, 1948 Ford Coupe
www.rallytheglobe.com
