DAVID EVANS

GROUP RALLYING EDITOR “Our woods in GB still cut the mustard”

Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship is a walk in the park. Compared with the challenge it provided all those years ago, you remember the one? The run up and down the country with only 10 minutes sleep and a packet of Polos to keep you going. These days? Like I said, walk in the park.

Regardless of your chosen field of play, you’ll find the old boys (and girls) did it faster, further and harder than today. But I’d like to point out, as a final word on last month’s Wales Rally GB, that Britain’s round of the world championship remains just as much of a test as it ever did. Granted, it might offer more sleep and less stages, but the roads, well, the roads remain a significant conundrum for inbound first-time Finns.

Last year Esapekka Lappi came to Britain for the first time and backed his Skoda Fabia R5 into a Myherin tree almost immediately. He did go on to win WRC2, but this time around the now-toyota driver was lost.

“I simply don’t understand the grip,” he said. “It looks OK and the last corner was good, but this one is like ice.”

It was the same for his much-fancied and enormously hyped (I might have added a little fuel to this particular fire…) countryman Kalle Rovanpera. The 17-year-old knew GB would be tough because his father Harri had told him so. But Kalle’s been driving cars on the limit on snow and ice for the last nine years, so limited grip is no bother to him.

Inconsistent grip, however, is another matter entirely. Friday lunchtime and Rovanpera looked lost. The car set-up was all wrong, but he didn’t really have much of a clue how to make it all right. Before you know what you want from the car, you have to have an idea of what you’re going to get from the road. And that was where the Finns fell down.

I put these points to Sebastien Ogier and he smiled a wry smile.

“I was afraid of this event for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t understand it. You have to learn and that’s experience.”

I feel reassured that, despite a decline in the need for Proplus, our woods still cut the mustard and test the mettle.

One driver who definitely cut the mustard, despite not being in Wales for five years, or a rally car for 12 months was John Maccrone. The Mull man’s experience of four-wheel drive is limited to a couple of hundred miles and he drove his first WRC round in more than two years with a £20,000 insurance excess at the forefront of his mind. Maccrone’s 10th in class might not catch the eye, but as with all of these things, it’s worth having a peak beneath the result to see the story that lies behind. John’s got pace, determination and, from some of his times on Rally GB, a pretty good grasp of what it takes to make a car work in Wales.