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Our Club Patron "Lofty" Drews

As from our last Annual General Meeting in November 2006, we are pleased and honoured to announce that Lofty Drews has accepted the position as the Z Car Club Q Inc. Club Patron. We are very lucky to have Lofty as our Club Patron. Lofty prominently featured in the early motorsport successes of Datsuns and Nissans and still competes in these marques.

Few people seem to know that Lofty Drews was actually named Harald-Willy Drews by his South German parents. Born on 16th July 1940 in Tanga, Tanzania and spent many years in Kenya with wife and two children.

Lofty Drews became a specialist in exotic long distance rallies and whilst active in motorsports since 1957, a search of the internet reveals a string of successes in the 1970's through to the 1980's with the most notable being the now famous first place in the 1973 East African Safari Rally where he co-drove for Shekhar Mehta in a Datsun 240Z. Lofty also experienced many top 5 results in the safari rally with notable drivers including Sandro Munari, Rauno Aaltonen and Jayant Shah.

In more recent years, Lofty has returned to the revived Classic East African Safari Rally in a Datsun 180B and will be competing in the 2007 event in the Datsun 240Z which was intended to be run in the previous event but, due to shipping delays, missed the start. Final preparation for this vehicle was undertaken at the Z Car Workshop by Alan Stean, Simon Rhodes and our President, Robin Evans.

The Z Car Club of Q Inc looks forward to a long association with Lofty Drews and we will watch with interest his international rallying exploits. Lofty currently lives up on the range in the Toowoomba district, so we look forward to his involvement in selected future Z Car Club of Q Inc. events.

below are some interesting links about some of his exploits: http://www.rallybase.nl/index.php?type=profile&driverid=2744
http://www.rally-africa.com/drews.asp
http://www.datsunhistory.com/rallyhistory1.html

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