20-Horsepower Trabants Sputter Way Across Deserts, Mountains in Grueling Rally

The Trabant, the sputtering little car that symbolized Communist East Germany’s outmoded economy, has just survived a grueling rally race across Europe to Morocco--and back.

“We were just as much a novelty in Morocco as camels would be here,” said Ulrich Michel, chief mechanic for the “Cardboard Racer” rally, after its 22 Trabants returned to Leipzig last month, cheered by crowds lining the streets.

The trip was organized after futile attempts to get Trabants admitted to the famous Paris-Dakar rally, linking the French and Senegalese capitals, in 1991.

The brightly painted boxlike cars set off from Berlin in March and headed across Germany, Luxembourg, France and Spain and into the rugged interior of Morocco.

The rally’s organizers proudly noted that neither the searing heat of the southern Iberian coast nor snowdrifts in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains could defeat the little car once described as being like a “sewing machine on wheels.”

“We wanted to show the skeptics that the ‘Trabi’ is a car that really can be driven,” said Martin Otto, spokesman for the 6,200-mile rally, open only to Trabants.

Under communism, East Germans would paste bumper stickers reading “Trabi Drivers Are The Toughest” on their cars--which they had to wait for up to 15 years to buy on order from antiquated state-run factories.

The two-stroke Trabis, as they are affectionately known, first went into production in 1957. The design had changed little when the last Trabant rolled off the production line last year.

Trabant owners would stop at nothing to patch up the car’s ramshackle mechanics and frail fiberglass body to keep it running 20 years or more. There were no other cars to buy at short notice. Western models were virtually unobtainable.

East Germany’s 1989 revolution brought fleeting fame to the Trabant as thousands of East Germans fled to the west in the cars after Hungary opened its border with Austria to citizens of other Communist states.

After the Berlin Wall came down, several Western motoring magazines and newspapers voted the Trabant their “Car of the Year.”

But with unification the next year, eastern Germans ditched their Trabants in favor of modern, faster west German cars. Now stripped Trabant wrecks litter the landscape.

With about 20 horsepower, the Trabant may be the slowest car in Europe. Its coughing motor emits stinking clouds of exhaust. The Trabant’s body, while immune to rust, is a brittle deathtrap in accidents.

But legions of Trabants still ply eastern Germany’s rutted roads, reflecting either unshakable loyalty or a lack of money to buy a costly Western model.

Michel, the rally mechanic, said the only Trabant among the 22 to withstand the odyssey without a single breakdown was the most ancient of the lot--a red 1960 Trabant with 180,000 miles on the odometer.

“I attached a little charm device to the engine,” driver Jens Ullmann said with a smile.

Three Trabants had their engines replaced en route.

“Everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong with a Trabi, but luckily you can repair everything yourself, in contrast with modern cars,” said Michel.

One Trabant team had to abandon the race in Spain after vandals damaged their car during an overnight stopover.

The idea for the rally came from Rolf Becker, an east German organ grinder who trundled across the United States in his Trabant in 1990, earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

After futile attempts to get Trabants admitted to the Paris-Dakar rally, Becker organized the trip to Marrakesh.

The Trabis set out on March 7, led by a 1959 fire department truck serving as a mobile garage. The cars covered an average of 250 miles daily at top speed--62 m.p.h.

“I was most enthralled by the huge canyons in Africa,” recalled Michel, alluding to Morocco’s interior highlands, an exotic locale for most eastern Germans, who had little chance to travel outside the Eastern Bloc before 1989.

“The local people were no less astounded. They were constantly searching for the Trabant’s fuel tank and could not believe it was under the engine hood.”