AT NIGHT, THE MOROCCAN HIGHWAY looks like any other truck-filled thoroughfare, but pull off into a village and you'll find the streets buzzing—groups of young men strolling, talking, and conducting business to avoid the heat of the day. An hour after entering the country, we pulled into a floodlit village to top off the tank, but the shadowy figures and maze of streets caused Sid to beat a fidgety retreat. An hour later, he dared a brief pit stop at a bright neon Afrique gas station, grabbing high-octane coffee and bread. Then it was south, south, south, zipping between the lumbering trucks into the darkness. At six in the morning—as the muezzins called morning prayers and the sun revealed the dusty skyline of Casablanca—Sid pulled into the financial district, parked Ros Bif in the shade of the most Western-looking bank he could find, and fell asleep in the driver's seat.

We lagged for three days as Sid and Martin negotiated replacement visas with the Mauritanian embassy. Then we jammed south to Marrakesh in a fever, convinced that we'd fallen dangerously behind the pack. Just as we were giving up hope of seeing any other rally cars, we spotted Rural Chic—a team of two recent grads from Bristol University in a canary-yellow 1978 Fiat 128—loitering at the edge of a gas station.

Over the next hour, eight more teams joined us to build a safe-passage convoy over the Atlas Mountains. The three cars of Team SloMoShun appeared, as did the Sons of Hasselhoff and the Conedodgers. Our conga line chugged nose to tail up the narrow, shoulderless highway that winds steeply out of Casablanca through 11,000-foot peaks before dropping to the flat plains of the Sahara. Around every turn we glimpsed vistas of surrounding desert before plunging back into lush mountain valleys.

But Sid wasn't interested in scenery. We were the caboose, and he wanted pole position. As the convoy began ascending a long incline, a glint came into his eye. "Watch this," he said, pulling into the opposite lane and gunning the motor. Ros Bif did her best. She passed one car. Two cars. After what felt like ten minutes, we were halfway to the front, but then a freight truck crested the hill ahead of us and began barreling down on our little Spanish sardine can.

Sid had two choices: crank the wheel to the right and knock Team SloMoShun's blue Citröen XL into the abyss, or plow headfirst into the rig. For a heartbeat he did nothing, then, at the last second, the semi swerved into the roadside rocks, the Citröen edged right, and we squeezed through the gap.

The glares from the other teams pierced Ros Bif like lasers, but Sid kept his eyes forward, flooring over the top of the crest until he had taken the lead. "I'm trained in advanced driving!" he fumed. "If they all knew how to drive, there shouldn't have been a problem!"