“I’stut-tut!” The word is Zulu, and means “motorcycle.” At the D-J Rally, the onomatopoeia comes alive. It is exactly the sound emitted by a single-cylinder Velocette—or BSA, Norton or Triumph, etc. And a lone Swiss-made Motosacoche.
For two days each year in early March, that sound echoes off the krantzes of the Drakensberg Mountains and putters onward across the Highveld. It’s the D-J. And it’s unique.
D-J stands for Durban-to-Johannesburg, and the annual rally commemorates a completely crazy 400-mile public roads race, that ran from 1913 until 1936, until finally sanctity prevailed in the form of state intervention after (amazingly) the first fatal accident.
But the D-J was not to be forgotten.