BOG IE WIN SA SM C RA E’ S LIFE IS CELEBRATED
Coltness car club ran one-off event dedicated to colin mcrae
Organiser: Coltness CC When: September 23 Where: Craigvinean Forest, Perth and Kinross Stages: 4 Starters 45.
Although David Bogie and Damien Connolly won last weekend’s one-off Mcrae Gravel Challenge, for once it wasn’t really about winning, it was all about taking part.
Don’t kid yourself. Show a rally driver a nice smooth, fast and flowing stretch of forest road and the knuckles whiten as the hackles rise. But with no championship points at stake, the rivalry was just as friendly as it was fierce, and the banter even fiercer.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the loss of ‘one of their own’, Coltness Car Club created a 30-mile route over four stages within the confines of Craigvinean Forest in Perthshire.
Having originally intended to enter his Ford Escort Mk2, Bogie turned up in his Skoda Fabia R5 as a full-blown test ahead of Rally GB. “It was too good a chance to miss, we’ve got some new development DMACK tyres to try out,” he said. “But it’s wetter and more slippery than we were expecting.”
Even so, four fastest times meant everyone else was fighting over second. He might well have had more of a scrap on his hands had second placed Andrew Gallacher and third placed Quintin Milne not slipped up.
Gallacher finished 1m23s behind the leader in his Focus WRC, but dropped 20 seconds in SS2. “The back end just stepped out under braking on the approach to a hairpin and we shot up a banking backwards,” he said, losing both front and rear bumpers in the process. “I thought the idea was to keep it in the spirit of Colin!”
Milne missed out on second by just 1s. “It was my own fault,” he admitted. “I spun between the log piles in Stage 3 and I had to drive back and handbrake it round.”
One second separated fourth and fifth place too, with Barry Groundwater just pipping John Wink. Groundwater kept it clean and tidy in the Mitsubishi Lancer, but the difference might have gone the other way had Wink’s Hyundai not taken a liking to banking in the first stage and visited a firebreak on the second!
Bruce Mccombie was another to visit the Hermitage banking in the first stage, but scored sixth with his Lancer just ahead of the Escort Mk2 of Greg Mcknight.
First time out in the Millington-engined machine, Mcknight was playing to the gallery, and loving it, and still managed to finish seventh.
Mcknight therefore finished top two-wheeldrive car with Steve Bannister in 10th place in his Historic-spec Mk2, although the expected battle with Matthew Robinson fizzled out in the first stage when the glorious Alitalialiveried Fiat 131 spun off into the undergrowth. Even more gutted was young Finlay Retson. Barely half a mile into the first test, the Ford Fiesta’s gearbox let go quite violently.
The event provided a fitting tribute and Craigvinean Forest the ideal backdrop as hundreds of fans trekked out of the forest afterwards with smiles on their faces and their own personal memories of the one and only, Colin Mcrae.