Mark Thatcher - Motorsport Career

Motorsport Career

Through his father's golfing friendship and business partnership with company founder David Wickins, British Car Auctions agreed to sponsor Thatcher's motor racing career.

In 1982, while competing in the Paris-Dakar rally, Thatcher, his French co-driver, Anne-Charlotte Verney, and their mechanic went missing in the Sahara Desert for six days. On 9 January 1982, the trio became separated from a convoy of vehicles after they stopped to make repairs to a faulty steering arm. They were declared missing on 12 January; after a large-scale search, a C-130 Hercules search plane from the Algerian military spotted the white Peugeot 504 some 50 km off course on 14 January. Thatcher, Verney and the mechanic were all found unharmed.

Before competing he said:

  • "I've now raced in Le Mans and other things – this rally is no problem".
  • "I did absolutely no preparation. Nothing."

About the Paris-Dakar of 1982, Thatcher wrote:

  • "So The Boss (the prime minister) does entirely the right thing, picks up the phone to the ambassador in Algiers and says, "Can you find out what is going on?" The ambassador then rings the prefect of the region who says there are four people missing and that I am one of them."
  • "We stopped. The others stopped too, took a note of where we were and went on. But the silly bastards – instead of telling everyone we were 25 miles east when they finished the section, they told them we were 25 miles west."
  • "The biggest story of 1982 was the Falklands war. The second biggest also involved my mother... and me."

He competed on the circuits in Sports 2000, Thundersports and eventually graduated to the European Touring Car Championship with semi-works BMWs.

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