The 1972 Rally That Started With 43 Cars and None Finished

In 1972, 43 cars entered the Rallye Bandama in Côte d'Ivoire. None of them finished. Not a single one. It remains the only international rally on record where every car failed to complete the course — and almost no one talks about it. This is the full story of the Rallye Bandama: a French enthusiast's attempt to build a rally harder than the Safari, the 1972 edition that broke every car and every driver on the entry list, and the decades of institutional neglect that turned one of motorsport's most extreme events into a footnote. Plus the story of Kenjiro Shinozuka — the first Japanese driver to win a WRC round — who claimed the Bandama's final two WRC editions before the sport simply walked away. The Ivory Coast Rally was brutal, forgotten, and ultimately abandoned by the FIA without ceremony. This is why.