 The initial UK£10,000 winner's prize offered by the "Daily Express" was soon joined by a £3,000 runners-up award and two £2,000 prizes for the third-placed team and for the highest-placed Australians, all of which were underwritten by the "Daily Telegraph" newspaper and its proprietor Sir Frank Packer, who was eager to promote the Antipodean leg of the rally.An eight-man organising committee was established to create a suitably challenging but navigable route.Jack Sears, organising secretary and himself a former racing driver, plotted a 7,000-mile course covering eleven countries in as many days, and arranged that the P&O liner "S.S. Chusan" would ferry the first 72 cars and their crews on the nine-day voyage from India, before the final 2,600 miles across Australia