The modified Mercedes Benz Sprinter 4x4 that Sue Mead will drive in the Gazelle Rally.
A detail of a typical map used in the Gazelle Rally. The white area at right is Algeria.
Among the van's modifications: racing seats.
Damage to the underbody of van that competed in last year's Gazelle Rally.
Mead's van is equipped with air compressors and hoses to deflate the tires for better traction on sand dunes and reinflate them when the team gets back to harder-packed dirt.
Sue Mead's van will be packed with tools, ladders and four spare tires.
Sue Mead shows her route for the nine-day Gazelle Rally across North Africa. The Williamstown resident begins her latest motor trek across the Sahara on Wednesday using the outdated map.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Sue Mead is at the point in her automotive career where she is not looking for new challenges.
She has written about the industry since 1988, competed in off-road races around the globe and been inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame.
The 64-year-old Williamstown resident said she gave up on adding countries to her "bucket list" because new challenges kept finding her. Case in point: the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles, the largest all-female motorsport competition on the planet, on which Mead embarks on Wednesday in Morocco.
"I would not be doing the rally if Mercedes Benz hadn't asked me and made it so easy to do," Mead said this month.
"Easy" is a relative term.
The Gazelle Rally is a nine-day trek across some of the most unforgiving terrain in North Africa. Mead and a partner will take a modified Mercedes Benz Sprinter 4x4 over mountains, through sand dunes, along camel trails and across dry lake beds in a daily quest to reach their assigned destinations in as short a distance as possible.
And they will do it without cell phones and without GPS. Armed only with outdated maps from the 1940s through 1960s, a compass, a plotter and their wits, Mead and navigator Shennen Marschner of California will take on 184 two-woman teams from around the world in the globe's largest all-female off-road competition.
Mead, who has competed in the famed Dakar Rally (winning 2011) and the Baja 1000, is undaunted by the terrain she will face in Morocco.
She is a little intimidated by the rally's format of denying teams access to global positioning system technology, a staple in other events of this kind.
"What's very new for me is not having the use of a GPS and having hand-drawn, old maps," Mead said.
With a map from last year's competition spread out on the coffee table of her Front Street home, Mead describes the daily challenges that Gazelles confront.
"In order to not help the women in the rally, very few people get the same checkpoints to go to," she said, referring to the seven or eight stops drivers must make in a typical 10- to 12-hour driving day. "So if you start to follow someone else, they might not have your exact coordinates.
"This is an example of what would be a typical day. You would go here and then look at this terrain and know you needed to end up here. And you can see that this is really difficult, with some dunes. There are camel trails, and camel trails can be something good to follow. There are small rivers and dry lake beds. So what we'd do is make a decision to try to cut through and and try to find a really good course."
Mead knows something about blazing trails.
When she broke into the motorsports business, it was much more male-dominated even than it is today. As a journalist at the now-defunct North Adams Transcript, Mead mentored a Mount Greylock student named Peter MacGillivray, who ended up recommending Mead for a position at Four Wheeler Magazine, where she started writing in 1988.
"I became drawn to the fact that four-wheel drive vehicles could take me to places where the pavement ended and to beautiful places in the beyond," she said. "I was drawn to learn more about the vehicles because I wanted to have the adventures."
And it wasn't long before she was intrigued by off-road competitions.
"In the early '90s, I started learning about an event called Camel Trophy, which was the world's most extreme four-wheeling event," Mead said. "I became interested in it, and I was told ... that I couldn't go because I was a woman.
"That was in 1992, and I went for the first time in 1995, and I went four times."
Today her "day job" is an automotive test driver, trying out vehicles at home and abroad. And she satisfies her quest for adventure and competitive spirit with events like the Gazelle Rally and the Mexican 1000, where she will compete in April with Rod Hall, a fellow Hall of Famer who was Mead's trainer 20 years ago.
Mead's 2007 induction into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame notes that at that time she had driven enough off-road miles "to have circumnavigated the world in the dirt."
Not all of those miles were driven in competitions.
"I've done a lot of both mission work and relief work after disasters in our own country and in Haiti," she said. "It's a surprise to people that four-wheeling has given me a way to help in the world. I went down right after [Hurricane] Katrina and was able to be in Hummers and help deliver doctors and nurses and food and things."
Mead is proud that the Gazelle Rally has no prize money. Instead, any profit generated from sponsorship goes to Coeur de Gazelles (Heart of Gazelles), a non-profit that engages in activities like building schools and bringing medical care to the people of North Africa. During the nine days of racing that begin on March 25, the rally will send teams of doctors and nurses out into the Sahara region along with the racers.
Of course, even humanitarians can face peril in North Africa, where the self-proclaimed Islamic State has a foothold in Algeria, on Morocco's eastern border.
"People have asked me, are you worried because of ISIS being on the border," Mead said. "And I feel a true sense of safety both with the organizers [of the rally] and because we have the King of Morocco watching over us as our patron."
But Mead understands the danger inherent in her globe-trotting, and she has experienced it first hand.
"I was airlifted when I was racing in 2000 in Africa out of the country of Niger to Libya for safety because Islamic dissident terrorists were hiding out in the Sahara," she said. "Three hundred fifty of them were hiding out and wanted to do harm to us. It was uncovered by the French intelligence service."
On another trip from Singapore to Bangkok, Mead's team was shot at. Once in Mongolia, from the window of her hotel she could see Molotov cocktails being thrown during an uprising.
"So I've really had at least three incidents that have had a serious element of danger to them," Mead said.
But she is able to keep the danger in perspective.
"Last year, I traveled 130,000 air miles, and I realized that every time I drive to the Albany (N.Y.) airport, every time I get on an airplane and travel the world, there's an element of danger," Mead said. "That makes me go for it. It just makes me want to go for my life.
"I have a very strong belief that I can travel the world and participate in adventures and do some good will work, and that will suit me in the world better than staying at home."
To learn more about the Gazelle Rally or to write Mead and her teammate encouraging emails they can read at the bivuoac at night during the race, visit: www.rallyeaichadesgazelles.com.
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Sue Mead shows her route for the nine-day Gazelle Rally across North Africa. The Williamstown resident begins her latest motor trek across the Sahara on Wednesday using the outdated map.
