US ambassador Caroline Kennedy prepares for Shitbox Rally across outback Australia

The US ambassador to Australia might become the first person to complete the charity Shitbox Rally with a blacked-out, armoured SUV in tow.

Caroline Kennedy is to swap her chauffeured BMW for the driver’s seat of beat-up Ford Falcon, driving from Adelaide to Perth in April in a car worth less than $1,500 to raise money for cancer research.

Shitbox Rally was founded in 2010 by James Freeman who lost both his parents to cancer within a year. It has since raised more than $40m for research across Australia, with each rally crew acting as fundraisers for the Cancer Council.

Kennedy’s Falcon, dubbed Moonshot, has been named in honour of US president Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, which aims to eradicate the disease, and as a homage to her father’s ambition to reach the moon in the 1960s.

“We do these things because they’re hard,” said Kennedy, channelling words spoken in 1962 by her father, former US president John F Kennedy, as he explained why the US wanted to land a man on the moon.

“I’ve met so many inspiring scientists here in Australia, who are working to cure cancer and have a lot going on with colleagues in the United States … [and] having met the people I’ve met, I could not be more hopeful.”

On Sunday morning, the ambassador and her team sizzled hundreds of sausages and kilos of onions outside a hardware store to raise money for the Cancer Council.

Caroline Kennedy at a sausage sizzle in Canberra on Sunday. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

The rally in April will take drivers from Adelaide to Roxby Downs, on to Yulara in central Australia, west into Warburton, Laverton, Southern Cross and finally into Perth.

It will be far from the glamour of the marble-lined ambassador’s residence at the US embassy in Canberra, with participants packing their own tents, swags, sleeping bags and mattresses to camp overnight at each stop.

Each two-person team needs to raise a minimum of $5,000 to participate.