• Overland Challenge - Overview
• Overland Challenge - Team
• Overland Challenge - Map
• Overland Challenge - Itinerary
• Diary - Richard Creasey
• Photos - Richard Blanshard
• Poems - Jeni Ballagh
• Video - Kees t'Hooft
• Ford Mondeo - Specifications
• Ford Maverick - Specifications

As we approach the first decade of the first century of the third millennium, it's clear that the world as we know it will only survive if we work together, think of ourselves as neighbours, and fight as one team for what we believe in.
- Richard Creasey

Watch the Introduction Video.

We are proud to be able to offer you something very exciting indeed - something of a first - and which is entirely exclusive to 360. We are publishing the diaries of our very own Richard Creasey, written during his incredible journey as leader of the international Overland Challenge Expedition. In 1993, he assembled a team which attempted to be the first ever to drive from London to New York - a journey that was considered at the time to be absurd and quite impossible by a whole bunch of expert commentators. The Overland Challenge expedition would involve the first ever 'drive' through the Channel Tunnel as part of a journey - which was then only very recently completed - and a hair-raising dash across the vast and treacherous Russian continent in temperatures falling as low as -59°C. No previous attempts had ever been successful. The Overland Challenge was a remarkable expedition undertaken as a United Nations 50 anniversary project. Here we recreate the journey for you through the eyes of team leader Creasey and his intimate diaries, through the photographs of team photographer Richard Blanshard, and through the poems of participant Jeni Ballagh

Introduction

Cups of Tea with Agatha Christie

Along with Douglas Adams and Robbie Stamp, award-winning television producer Richard Creasey was one of the co-founders of h2g2 and can comfortably be described as being one of life's more interesting characters. He is the son of world famous author John Creasey who is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the writer with the most rejections for a first novel. He had an incredible 720 'no's before a publisher finally accepted one of his books. Incredibly, he then went on to write 565 full-length published books, which, at the time, was another Guinness Record. Creasey junior can recall as a child afternoons spent in the summer sun in the company of Agatha Christie, who liked to share cups of tea in the garden with his famous Dad. As he is most keen to point out himself, Richard Creasey's life seemed rather blessed with good luck, and no little magic, right from the word go.

First Time Round the World

In the early days when American publishers still resisted the charm of his father's books - in fact they refused to publish a single one of them claiming them too 'parochial' for the American market - John Creasey took his young family on a worldwide trip to prove a point. During this rather odd family excursion - all of them piled in the back of an old car - he wrote countless novels, remarkably getting many of them published along the way in the several different countries the family passed through. He finally returned to the American publishing houses 18 months later, but this time as an author who had been published in very many different languages, and the publishing grandees' previous arguments concerning his 'parochialism' started to look a bit thin. John Creasy went on to find no less than five major US publishing companies who ended up publishing literally hundreds of his books.

Everything is Possible...

So, from a very early age, Richard Creasy had absorbed two very important things deep in his bones: the seductive panorama of world-wide travel, and a distinct sense, perhaps an almost naive belief, that quite literally everything is possible. Which is just as well, because the Overland Challenge expedition was to be fraught with real danger and no little political difficulty, almost at every conceivable juncture.

The troupe of cars that would eventually make its mad journey across the world would have to early on leave behind the smooth autoroutes of modern Europe and encounter instead hostile terrain, at times totally unforgiving. And this sweep across Russia towards the Bering Straits would involve a whole host of characters - film makers, documentary makers, army generals, KGB men, Russian mafia, Gulag prisoners - all of whom were some way involved in either conspiring with, or conspiring against this race against time. For let's not forget, any attempt to drive from London to New York means exactly that - no boats and no aeroplanes. Timing was to be everything. The drive had to coincide with the Bering Straits being frozen over and therefore the team had no choice but to drive their vehicles in the middle of winter in a part of the world where the weather is desperately cruel at the best of times. Let's face it, winter time in the Arctic zone is no place for mankind and his motor car.

Trouble With the Tunnel

However, problems were already presenting themselves - in rather unexpected places. Crucial to the funding and sponsorship deals was the fact that Richard Creasey had managed to persuade Alistair Morton, the Chairman of the Channel Tunnel project, to let his team drive through the Channel Tunnel, then still being built. No one had ever done this before, and once the Eurotunnel trains were operational, no one would ever do it again. So, merrily off Richard went to all the big wigs with the cash telling them all that to sponsor the Overland Challenge was a great thing for many reasons, one of them being that their name will be forever associated with the first and only 'drive' from England to France.

Unfortunately, Creasey later found out that the French arm of the giant Channel Tunnel project had already signed a deal with one of the major French car companies - without informing the British arm - allowing them to have a potentially much publicised 'first' drive through the tunnel. Nonetheless, Alistair Morton agreed that Creasey's Overland Challenge team drive could drive through first anyway.

The only problem was that Richard Creasey had to keep this information absolutely to himself; later it could come out, but not now. The French car company had to believe, of course, that they were the first team to drive through the tunnel, and so the Overland Challenge Expedition was robbed of the potentially huge media interest that their initial crossing would create. Although the investors were eventually pacified, in the run up to the day of leaving, Creasey had to act dumb whenever interrogated by journalists who were massively intrigued by the whole international flavour of this audacious expedition. And when they naturally asked about where the expedition would start and how would it get to France, etc, Creasey mumbled a few 'don't knows' and 'we'll sees' when all the time he knew that his team was to make an historic crossing under the tunnel. It was just that they had to keep it all secret. Needless to say, the journalists thought Creasey to be a bit daft, and the whole project a bit hare-brained.

Undaunted, the Team Gets Ready

There would be plenty of other troubles to come, too. But the main thing was that the Overland Challenge was going to happen. The international team had been assembled, the United Nations and two of its agencies the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had formally endorsed the challenge, Ford had supplied most of the Western vehicles in which to make the drive, UralAZ the Russian all terrain truck company agreed to back the project, ITV crews had been organised to film the whole journey for a massive worldwide TV audience and spirits were generally flying high.

Learn more about the Team here

Richard Creasey’s …

... Overland Expedition diaries start as the team leaves London, on the verge of making an historic trip through the Channel Tunnel, hoping all the while that he won't be on the news for the political reasons explained above. Join the team and find out exactly what's on the mind of our expedition team leader, Richard Creasey as he and his team hurtle through Europe, in convoy, at high speeds in increasingly temperamental conditions.