From Restoration Build to Dakar Rally Contender: Real Life

When Helen Tait-Wright went to France alone to oversee a renovation project, she never dreamt she’d end up driving the Dakar rally, she tells Gillian Harvey..

When Helen Tait-Wright and her husband Chris bought their first French house in 2002, it was to fulfil Chris’s long-held dream of living in the country. “We’re both on our second marriage, and when we got together in 1998, we laid all our cards on the table,” Helen explains. “Chris told me he’d like to go and live in France. At the time, my only experience of the country was coming to Le Mans each year for the 24-hour race. But, I thought, why not?”

Little did she know that the move would be life-changing in unexpected ways. The pair initially bought a run-down stone farmhouse with land in Bouillé-Loretz, Deux-Sèvres, and began to make plans to renovate. “We decided to drive out for one week in each month to work on it,” says Helen. However, with progress relatively slow, the couple eventually decided that one of them had to move to France permanently to oversee the builders and artisans and be an on-site presence.

ALL CHANGE

That decision proved to be transformative for Helen, who relocated to France in January 2005 and met soon-to-be best friend Marcella almost immediately. “Shortly after I arrived, I almost had a head-on collision with a woman at a junction. We both apologised and went on our way. But then, a few days later, I went to a dinner party at a friend’s house and she was there!

“Marcella was over in France with her son Sam while her husband worked in the UK, so we were both in a similar position,” explains Helen. “We found that when you’re a relatively young woman living by yourself people seem to look at you as if you’ve got three heads, so we teamed up.”

With both husbands working away, the pair were able to navigate establishing their lives in France together. “It helped to have Sam, too, as he went to school, which meant we were able to make inroads in the local community,” says Helen.

The house Helen and Chris had purchased was an old farmhouse, with three hectares of land. As Helen had grown up on a farm, she felt quite at home. “It was a typical old French farmhouse, completely rundown. From upstairs, if you dared stand on the old floorboards, you could see through the roof! There was electricity, but no running water in the house. By the end, we’d fully renovated it, added a big extension and a garage big enough for seven cars.”

The latter may sound like overkill, but when the pair first moved to France they had a large collection of vehicles. “We owned around 14 sports cars in the UK, and when I first turned up I brought a Jaguar XK and a Land Rover with me. Chris’s pride and joy at the time was a Ferrari Testarossa.”

PETROL HEADS

Helen’s obsession with all things automotive – one she shares with Chris – began in childhood. “My mum would tell you that as a small child going out in the pushchair round our little village in the UK, I could name every car. I still have my 1968 Ladybird book of cars, which was my favourite thing,” she says. Living in France, however, had its share of challenges.

“Sadly, French roads and sports cars don’t go together. We evolved. One by one the sports cars had to go.” Instead, the pair turned their attention elsewhere.

“To me Land Rovers were more of a work vehicle and something I associated with the farm, rather than racing. But that would soon change.”
In 2012, despite working hard to create a beautiful rustic home, they decided to sell up, in part so they could take on a new challenge, but also because the amount of land in Bouillé-Loretz and the care it needed felt overwhelming. “Although I grew up on a farm, I never really realised the amount of work that went into looking after land. My father had always done that,” Helen says.

So, in September 2012, they bought their current property in Val-en-Vignes, which started out as an almost derelict barn. “We needed a new project. And this was the biggest we’ve tackled. It has 409 square metres of living space, and we’ve renovated the majority of it ourselves. It took us 10 years to complete.”

While many retire to France to live a quiet life, it seems Helen is doing just the opposite. “The house we’ve renovated is now for sale. I think when I’ve finished a project, I’m always looking for the next thing,” she admits. “My background is in design, I originally trained in fashion design and later interion design. I really enjoy planning a beautiful renovation and bringing it to life.”

RALLYING ROUND

Over the past 10 years, Helen has also been busy taking on another, unexpected challenge. “Visiting a friend in Morocco in 2015, I was talking about my love of cars and he asked me why I’d never done the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles du Maroc. It’s a French-organised women-only rally that happens each year.

“The conversation sowed a seed, and four years later I was in Morocco competing!” Helen’s first taste of rally driving turned into a whole new series of adventures. “The desert sand gets under your skin and calls you back!”

The Rallye des Gazelles is an endurance event, eight days in duration and covering thousands of off-road miles. As it’s a pure navigation rally, drivers and their navigators are not allowed to use GPS, just a basic compass and a black and white map on which they plot the checkpoints that mark their route.

MORE PLANNING

Meanwhile, Marcella, whose relationship had sadly broken down, moved back to the UK in 2010. However, she and Helen kept in regular contact, and during a visit to her friend in early 2022, a plan was hatched.

“The visit came on the back of a couple of horrible years,” Marcella explains. “I had a health scare in 2020. This resulted in a hysterectomy, which left me feeling shaken. My business also suffered during Covid times.”

As Helen relayed stories of rallying life to her friend, an idea started to form. “I was talking about how I was struggling to find a good navigator, and Marcella said, ‘can’t I come?’. I was astounded, as I’d never considered she might want to do it, but she was really keen.”

Soon after, Helen took Marcella to the local quarry, near Doué-la-Fontaine in her Land Rover and showed her the realities of off-piste driving. “She did really well – there were some very steep drops, but she coped admirably.”

Then, in September 2022, the pair undertook their first rally in Morocco. “Eight consecutive days of driving was a test of our friendship, but luckily we came through. I’d had other navigators before, but driving with Marcella was completely different,” says Helen. “Doing the rally with someone I know, and with whom I get on so well, made the whole experience a thousand times better.”

Moreover, as the rally was French run, the pair found that living in France proved a real advantage. “The Road Book is written in French, and the majority of the communication is in French. We have a massive advantage as a British team as we can understand what is going on before it’s translated. Being familiar with French culture also helps: like knowing that you won’t get any dinner until 9pm, so making sure we take our own food, as we prefer to eat earlier.”

DREAMING OF DAKAR

After undertaking a second rally the following year, where they finished as the second all-female crew, Helen and Marcella signed up for their biggest challenge to date. This was the Dakar Classic, which took place in January 2026, and in which they were the first-ever British all-female team to compete.

“Chris, who moved over to France permanently in 2009 after retiring from his haulage business, worked with me to build a custom car to the exacting standards required for Dakar,” says Helen. “It’s something we’d never done before, but it’s amazing what information you can discover on YouTube!” she adds. The event was a 14-day endurance rally, covering 7,281km, 4,162km of which was off-road.

And Helen, whose initial move to France was to fulfil Chris’s dream, has now well and truly fallen in love with life across the Channel. “I love the space. I go back to Suffolk where I used to live, but so much of the farmland has been sold for new developments. Living in France feels like going back in time to Suffolk 50 years ago.

“In terms of motor sports, it’s a great place to live. Rallying, particularly endurance rallying, is part of the French DNA in a way it isn’t in the UK. People in the UK think I’m insane to want to drive the Dakar rally, but the French people I know seem to understand.

“Coming to France alone made me stronger; and maybe in some ways that resilience has helped with the endurance part of the rallies. But more than anything, if I’d not done it, I may never have heard of the Rallye des Gazelles, and might never have met Marcella.”