Daughter at the Wheel, Mother on the Notes — The Gatimu Pair and Three Consecutive Safari Rally Starts | World Stage Journal
RALLY🇰🇪2026-03-15
Daughter at the Wheel, Mother on the Notes — The Gatimu Pair and Three Consecutive Safari Rally Starts
A Kenyan mother and daughter contesting the WRC in a Subaru Impreza GC8. In 2023 they became the first all-female crew to finish the Safari Rally. Their 2025 season with KCB Racing Team opens a new chapter
A daughter at the wheel, her mother reading the pace notes. No motorsport story quite like it exists anywhere in the world. Kenyan mother-and-daughter crew Tinashe Gatimu (driver, 20) and Caroline Gatimu (co-driver) contested the WRC Safari Rally for three consecutive years — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — in a Subaru Impreza GC8. In 2023, they became the first all-female crew in the history of the Safari Rally to reach the finish.
A daughter at the wheel, her mother reading the pace notes. The combination has no precedent in world motorsport. Kenyan mother-and-daughter crew Tinashe Gatimu (driver, 20) and Caroline Gatimu (co-driver) have contested the WRC Safari Rally for three consecutive years — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — in a Subaru Impreza GC8. In 2023, they became the first all-female crew to finish the Safari Rally in the event's history. In 2025 they joined KCB Racing Team as the team's first female crew, with sponsorship from Finsco Africa behind them. Their story is still being written.
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■ 1. What is the Safari Rally? — The world's oldest rally, run between Kenya's red soil and its wildlife
The Safari Rally has its origins in 1953 as an East African adventure road race covering more than 5,000 kilometres across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Competitors navigated roads shared with elephants, lions and terrain that bore little resemblance to the manicured stages of European rallying. After a long absence from the WRC calendar, the event returned in 2021, and its defining character has not changed. Red laterite gravel, deep ruts carved by rain and livestock, sudden mud sections appearing even in the dry season, and open savannah stretching to the horizon. Giraffe, elephant and zebra walk alongside the special stages — a spectacle found nowhere else in motorsport.
Tyre management and mechanical durability become decisive factors in a way that separates the Safari from every other WRC round. Even the fastest drivers in the world speak of simply surviving as a central strategic objective. The combination of altitude, equatorial heat and unpredictable terrain places extreme mechanical stress on every component. Tyre failures have cost potential winners at the final stage on multiple occasions. For a local Kenyan crew to contest this event in a Subaru Impreza GC8 — the same platform on which Carlos Sainz and Richard Burns competed when Subaru dominated the WRC in the 1990s — carries a particular meaning. It connects a current story to the roots of international rallying: a production car, an extraordinary road.
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■ 2. Who is Tinashe Gatimu? — Twenty years old, raised in Nairobi, racing by choice
Tinashe Gatimu was born around 2003-2004 in Nairobi, Kenya. Her father competed in Kenyan club-level motorsport, which meant that cars and rallies were part of the household before she was old enough to understand what a pace note was. From early adolescence she was around competitive vehicles, and her progression toward a WRC entry at the Safari Rally came through consistent participation in domestic events.
Racing as a young woman in Kenya is not the default path. Finding sponsorship, building trust within a technical team, performing under pressure at an international event — these are challenges that Tinashe has confronted at an age when many drivers are still competing regionally. She has spoken about using her results as her primary argument: the pace notes do not ask who you are.
Her first completion of the Safari Rally in 2023 stands as a watershed moment. Not just because she finished — finishing the Safari Rally is a meaningful achievement in any context — but because she and her mother Caroline crossed the line together as the first all-female crew in the history of the event. Statistics record it. The significance runs deeper.
■ 3. Who is Caroline Gatimu? — How a mother became a co-driver, and a family became a team
A co-driver's role is often described as reading the pace notes, as if it were straightforward narration. In practice it is something far more demanding. Caroline Gatimu, seated to the left in the Subaru Impreza GC8 as her daughter drives, must read the characteristics of corners — degree of severity, surface type, camber, distance markers — several hundred metres in advance, deliver that information with precise timing, and maintain a composed voice regardless of what is happening outside the windows.
Fear cannot enter the voice. Hesitation cannot slow the delivery. In a car that may be airborne over a crest or sliding through a dust cloud at high speed, the co-driver's calm is load-bearing. Caroline has developed this composure while sitting beside her own daughter at the wheel.
The story of how she came to occupy that seat matters. Caroline did not arrive at rallying through a conventional route. She began by supporting Tinashe's participation and moved progressively into the co-driver's role as the shared project took shape. What started as maternal support became a technical discipline, and then a competitive partnership in the fullest sense. The 2025 season with KCB Racing Team represents the most structured chapter of that journey so far: a professional environment, committed sponsorship, and a shared goal.
■ 4. KCB Racing Team and Kenyan motorsport — why a bank invests in rally
Kenya Commercial Bank — KCB — is the country's largest commercial bank by assets and one of East Africa's most recognised financial institutions. The KCB Racing Team draws from that corporate foundation, using motorsport as a platform for brand visibility, youth engagement and the kind of narrative that advertising budgets cannot easily replicate. A driver on the Safari Rally, on a stage watched by spectators lining the red-dust roads around Naivasha, carries the sponsor's identity into a context that is immediate, physical and shared by a crowd.
The 2025 addition of the Gatimu pair as the team's first female crew amplified that narrative significantly. Within Kenyan society, where gender disparities in professional sport remain significant, a bank-sponsored all-female rally crew carries meaning beyond motorsport. It functions as a statement about who belongs on the stage.
Finsco Africa, the real estate and investment company that also backs Tinashe and Caroline, operates under a brand logic that is easy to read: territory, investment, the belief that something new is being built. Rally drivers cross ground that others consider impassable. The metaphor is neither subtle nor accidental.
■ 5. Women drivers in Africa — the barriers, the changes, and the future Tinashe is opening
East African rallying has a longer history of female participation than is often acknowledged. Women competed in the East African Safari Rally as far back as the 1960s and 70s. What has remained limited is the sustained, professional presence of women at the highest levels of the regional and international calendar. The barriers are several: sponsorship access, cultural expectations about women's roles in technical professions, the absence of visible role models in the sport's recent memory.
Tinashe Gatimu's three consecutive WRC appearances, the historic 2023 completion, and the structural upgrade represented by the KCB team add up to something more than a personal story. They constitute a proof of concept: a young Kenyan woman, competing with her mother, in an internationally recognised competition, backed by credible sponsors, finishing the race. Each element matters. Together they function as a blueprint.
The question now is whether this blueprint produces followers. In motorsport, visibility creates possibility. A girl in Nairobi watching a Safari Rally broadcast in 2023 would have seen someone who looked like her cross the finish line. That image is difficult to quantify and impossible to replace. Tinashe Gatimu is twenty years old. The Safari Rally is one of the world's oldest competitions. What happens when the oldest race finds a new generation willing to run it.
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