SPECIAL MCRAE TRIBUTE 10 YEARS AFTER HIS PASSING
On Friday, it will be a decade since Colin Mcrae passed. Nicky Grist remembers his time co-driving the Scottish legend
It’s 10 years since we lost Colin. I still can’t believe it. It still doesn’t seem right, still doesn’t make sense. A decade ago this week, we lost one of Britain’s biggest and best sporting personalities. And one of the world’s fastest drivers. He was an incredible person to be around and I consider myself lucky to have shared the years I did with him.
Here’s the story of what Colin and I got up to from the start of the 1997 season until the last time we sat in a rally car together when we stood in for Sebastien Loeb in Turkey, 2006.
The Subaru seasons
My first time with Colin Mcrae was at our Monte Carlo test, that was OK. Then we went straight to Sweden for the Swedish test and we rolled. The car was fine, there was a lot of snow and there was no damage – but it was good to get that out of the way early…
Our first two rallies weren’t the best, we went off on some really bad ice on the Monte, taking a wheel off and then Sweden we got a half-decent result; that was how the first half of the year was for us, really. But Safari was good.
I joined Colin after being with Toyota and Juha Kankkunen, both experts at this kind of African rally, and I came with experience of doing 20,000 kilometres of testing for the Safari.
It became clear during the test with Colin that we needed to make a change to the notes. He had the usual, ‘care,’ ‘caution’ or ‘double caution.’ After one run, I suggested we add some more notes in to help describe what was in the road and the speed needed to pass. Colin needed to know if he was slowing down for rocks, a hole, a washaway or whatever. The speed-related words included ‘stop’ which you really needed just so you would get the speed right down and then creep into or over something.
We tried this on the test and Colin felt it worked well, so we went through the recce making notes with these extra words in and we were ready for the rally.
On the first day, we had an alternator problem which could have put us out. We were in a section near Kilimanjaro with about 30 miles remaining when the warning light came on. I radioed the helicopter above us and they came back and said: “Nick, we want you to pull all the fuses out, the diff fans, one fuel pump.” Then they came back on the radio and said: “Now we want you to take more fuses out and turn the radio off. If we need to talk to you, we’ll swoop down in front of you and you turn the radio on. OK?”
Er, OK! We watched the voltage come back a bit, but we were really teetering on the edge. Fortunately for us there was service in a schoolyard straight after the finish. As we were coming down the last straight, the car coughed a couple of times, but it made it to the finish and died in the control going into service. We pushed it in, the boys fitted a new battery and alternator and away we went.
The next day we left Nairobi at 0500hrs, bound for the stage we knew as the ‘road to hell’. It was so rocky, so bumpy and so slow, it was terrible. Tommi Makinen had six punctures in here and kept stopping to move the tyres around to try and make the finish of the stage. Our biggest problem was Colin needing a pee mid-way through. Turn three left plus onto Tarmac. Fourth gear. Fifth gear. Sixth gear. “Take the wheel.” What? “Take the wheel, I can’t hold it any more…”
We were flat in sixth and Colin had wedged himself in the seat and was trying to open the door to take a piss. Have you ever tried to open the door at 100mph? Don’t. It’s impossible. It went everywhere!
We were fastest by three and a half minutes and in the lead.
We went on to win that rally and I look back on that one with real pride. Let’s be honest, earlier in his career, events like the Safari really weren’t Colin’s style of rally. He drove too much with his heart and his right foot. But, bloody hell, we won the Safari three times, the Acropolis four times and events like Cyprus. Colin became the master of these rallies, but there would have been a day when it was Colin getting those six punctures Tommi had, but the work we’d done on the notes showed a different way.
We should have been champions in 1997. Look at the results: we won five rallies. Normally, five wins means a title. But we had five retirements and some serious cam belt issues.
There were more technical problems the following year. We won three rallies, but Colin felt the time had come to move. I remember him saying to me: “If I don’t move now, I’ll always be the Subaru man.”
Ultimately, I think Colin will forever be associated with Subaru. That blue and yellow 555 livery, for me, is the most iconic in motorsport. And it’s associated with one man: Mcrae.
The big Blue Oval move
It was a good time to move to Ford at the end of 1998. Martini was involved and the money was good. Really good. Colin’s deal was a real ground-breaker for drivers.
But when we went to look at the car, it didn’t look quite so good. The Focus was just so different to the Subaru. I remember the first test we did for Monte: it was a nightmare. There was no grip in the car and it felt dangerous. In the end we came down out of the mountains and headed towards St Tropez to try and find a dry road and some grip. But then we had a power steering problem and the thing caught fire, so we went home. We went back out to test between Christmas and New Year and it was a bit better.
When we started the first stage in Monte, there was some driveability, but we’d done so few miles in testing that, after about six miles, there was a smell in the car. The paint was burning on the transmission tunnel!
Third was an amazing result, but we lost that because of an irregularity with the water pump. Sweden was next and it wasn’t much better. Before we got to Safari, we’d been to Chateau Lastours, the really rough testing venue in the south of France, and the message had been simple from the team: “Break it.”
But we couldn’t. It was unbelievable what this car could take, so we knew going to Africa that we had a strong car. And, with Colin’s mastery of the event, we won it with no problems.
We’ve won the Safari! After all those problems at the start of the season, we’ve won the Safari! Then we went back to Europe and won Portugal. S**t, the job’s on here! But then it started to go wrong. We had retirement after retirement. I would say 1999 was, by some distance, the most frustrating season ever for Colin and I. You would go through all the hard work, the testing, the set-up tests, the recce, the rally, then you’d retire and come away with nothing.
That run continued into 2000 and it was tough. We got a couple of wins in 2000, but it was hard work still.
I will always remember the 2001 season as the one where Colin drove his best. He was sensational. We were in a massive fight with Peugeot and, in all honesty, I think we all knew that the 206 WRC was probably the better car at that point, but Colin kept on going and a tremendous middle sector of the year where we won three rallies – Cyprus, Acropolis and Argentina – back to back. Podiums in Finland and New Zealand kept us on course for the title.
And that takes us to the 2001 Rally GB showdown.
GBS that didn’t work
Colin and I won GB in 1997 and that was a fantastic feeling going back into Cheltenham as winners, it was
fantastic. But that win in that first year of us being together was as good as it would get.
We had these fantastic PR campaigns in the build-up to the event: the battle of Britain; Colin versus Richard, all that, but in the end the rallies just never came to us. On those battles with Richard, I have to say, Colin was an absolute master at winding Richard up. To us, it was all part of the game, but I think it got to Richard.
Anyway, we came into Rally GB in 2001 on the back of a tricky Rally Australia when Colin had arrived late for the road position selection meeting and he was forced to run first on the road and in the worst of the conditions. We finished fifth, but it could have been much more.
In Wales, we had to beat Richard and that was enough. Forget everything else. At Rally GB, we always stayed at my house in Abergavenny for the recce, it was close enough and it was nice to have the home comforts. Everything was looking good. There was a superspecial in Cardiff on the Thursday night and we won that, then we came to St Gwynno, the first stage on Friday morning at 0730hrs.
On the way out, I said: “Right Col, come on, we need to catch the boys asleep here…”
The speed just got bigger and bigger as the stage went on, Colin really ramped it up and his driving was sublime. I think we took two seconds out of Marcus Gronholm, but we had eight out of Richard. On the next stage, Marcus went quicker than us and maybe that was part of our downfall.
I remember going through Treorchy on the way to the next stage and Colin was really upset. “F**k, f**k! S**t! We needed to beat them. We need 30 seconds.”
Yeah, but we weren’t going to get 30 seconds in one stage. I kept telling him to relax and focus on Richard; we were still ahead of him. We’d come down the valley and we were starting to climb up to the start of the Rhondda stage and the weather was starting to close in. The fog was coming down a bit and Colin didn’t say much. Colin’s pace notes worked perfectly in 99.9 per cent of conditions, they gave him great feel for the road and allowed him to carry real speed. But in the fog, Richard’s notes described the road better and Colin knew that.
We went at it and again, the speed got quicker and quicker until we got to: ‘Five right plus and six left minus over crest, cut.’
Colin heard the note… and cut the five right. We hit a culvert and corkscrewed into a massive roll. Goodnight.
Beginning of the end
Naturally, Colin and I weren’t happy about what had happened in GB.
We were both genuinely pleased for Richard and Robert [Reid], it was great to see British world champions, but we were frustrated. Colin hadn’t over driven, he hadn’t been wild, he’d just misheard a note. Yes, we’d been pushing it before the crash, but there was only one corner where I might have questioned the speed.
We had to get on with it. The following season will be remembered as the one where Colin and I parted company after an accident in New Zealand. I wasn’t happy with the way I found out – from a journalist – but we parted on good terms and I’ll always be really happy that our last win together came on the last ever Safari Rally. That was a poignant one.
But later that year, that was that. We were finished. I moved on and started to work in television, but I wasn’t going to be a spoiled brat about it and sulk. Colin and I had always been great mates and that continued.
A couple of years later, I got a call from Skoda, asking if I thought there would be any chance of getting Colin involved in driving the Fabia WRC at Rally GB – Colin had stopped driving after Citroen in 2003. I said I would ask the question. Colin said he was interested and he wanted me to co-drive.
I was really pleased about that, it meant he’d realised things had worked between us. We did an awful lot of testing in Scotland before the rally and Colin really found some speed from the car.
In the end, that year’s Rally GB was overshadowed by the tragic accident that cost Michael Park his life, but Skoda was happy with Colin and I. Their head of PR called me and told me they’d had more exposure from that one event than they’d managed in all the 23 years of Skoda Motorsport before. They wanted us to go to Australia.
We took the girls – my wife Sharon and Alison [Mcrae] – down there with us and we had a great time. We really relaxed before the start and then we were up at the sharp end pretty quickly. Yes, there were a few retirements, but we were second going into the final day and we were confident we would finish the rally in that position.
But in the end, a clutch change went wrong and we didn’t leave service again. I’ve never seen a team as disappointed as that one; the guys were in tears – this was their chance.
There was a chance we could do something with Skoda for the following year, but it didn’t happen. We did X Games the following year and this just broadened Colin’s appeal further. We rolled a Subaru in the final stage in a stadium in Los Angeles, but carried on to finish second. The place went nuts. People couldn’t believe what we’d done, but they didn’t understand – that was what we did. That made the main news nationwide in America on two major channels. We were sponsored by No Fear!... they couldn’t believe their luck!
Not long after that we did Rally Turkey in Sebastien Loeb’s car, when he broke his shoulder. That was the last time I was in a rally car with Colin and it didn’t end the way we wanted: we retired on the last stage after a tricky event.
And that was the end of an amazing time of my life with Colin. What a privilege it was for me to co-drive for a guy who transcended his sport. People would often ask me how it felt from the inside of this ‘wild ride.’ Honestly, it never felt wild. Colin was one of the best and most naturally gifted drivers in the world and, inside the car, everything flowed beautifully. Maybe, maybe if I’d managed to get him to take a leaf out of Juha’s book and settle for second once in a while, there might have been more titles. But that wasn’t Colin.
Do I regret anything? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Like everybody else, I just miss him. ■
The unique Buckler DD1 returned to Goodwood for the first time since 1955 in the Madgwick Cup. The 1500cc car, built for Le Mans but not raced there, spent time in New Zealand and was driven last weekend by Robert Newall. He qualified 14th in wet conditions and finished 16th in the dry against more modern opposition. The pole car for the race, the Lola Mk1 of Ben Adams, was the machine that won the final Goodwood race in period. Adams spun early in Saturday’s race before recovering to fourth.