WEARDEN’S BRC ADVENTURE
The Ulster Rally in 1999 was the scene of a special victory.
This year’s Ulster Rally marks 20 years since Neil Wearden stormed to his first ever international victory at the wheel of a Vauxhall Astra Kit Car. He first came to prominence through the lower ranks of the British Rally Championship, winning the Junior title in 1995. But it wasn’t until he was armed with a Honda Civic and teamed up with Trevor Agnew for 1997 that he truly burst onto the scene.
“We were giant-killers,” Agnew remembers. “We finishing fourth and fifth overall on some rallies, it was an amazing turn of speed. And at the end of that [year] we effectively had four manufacturers that we had offers with [for a drive the following season].”
Volkswagen, SEAT, Citroen and Vauxhall were all interested, but the duo elected to head to Vauxhall to become team-mates with World Rally
Championship podium finisher,
Jarmo Kytolehto.
“Vauxhall were quite good, because we had Jarmo as my team-mate who’d already been with them for a year,” Wearden says. “Going into the ’99 season they didn’t put any expectations on me until the middle of the year.
“For Ulster we ended up getting the new car [Vauxhall Astra Kit Car]. We had this specifically-built Tarmac car which was a flat-pack for want of a better phrase. It wasn’t a bodyshell as such, it was a floorpan and wings all built in the factory so they could make it as light as possible. I remember doing the test in it in southern Ireland just before the Ulster, and it did feel a lot livelier.
“That’s when I had a meeting with
Mike Nicholson [team manager] who said ‘I want to take up the option on you for the 2000 season.’ Whether that spurred me on or the new car spurred me on, but it all fell into place and the next thing we were leading the Ulster.”
The 1999 season was dominated by Renault, as defending champion Martin Rowe took victory in Wales before teammate Tapio Laukkanen won the Pirelli, Scottish and the Jim Clark. But the form book was ripped up as the series headed to Ireland.
Rowe crashed out on SS2, and the championshipchasing Laukkanen
a w1heel0o2f/f0h2i/s2018 Megane that same morning putting him out of contention.
“I remember it very clearly,” Agnew says. “By the end of stage four, we had something like a 30-second lead, we already had one fastest time and I think we had only one other over the next 20 stages of the event. It just felt really relaxed for us, we didn’t have any dramas apart from a misfire that didn’t really cost us much time.
“I remember the last stage of the event,” Wearden adds. “We had a big lead, Tapio was just driving around as I think he had won the championship and Trevor said ‘look just drive it, we want to be at the end’ and I said ‘Trevor, we’ve got it, don’t you worry about it’.
“The sixth sense or whatever you want to call it, I knew we were going to be winning that rally. Whether everything fell into place [because of ] signing the contract for the year after, getting the new car, people falling out, crashing, having problems, all I can remember is not feeling the pressure that I’d probably expect to feel.”
Unknown at the time, it was arguably the pinnacle of Wearden’s career as just one further BRC victory followed – the MSA Rally – in 2000. Vauxhall pulled out at the end of that year, but Wearden’s eyes were already on a much larger prize.
“We put together a 10-year plan for Neil and I to become world champions, and that was the structure of what we did,”
reveals. “And from that 10-year plan down to every single stage we had a strategy and a goal set for it. I realised quite quickly that there was no automatic right to get into the world championship, so we had to find a way to do it.
“And over a pint we came up with this idea ‘why not do what [Timo] Johki does in Finland and try and get an investor to invest in us as oppose to try and get sponsorship?’
“So that was how we started and we co-founded Slipstream Sports Management. By Easter 2001, I remember it well because it was Mark Higgins’ stag do, it was the day we announced we had £1 million in the bank and we were off doing rallying in a Peugeot 206 [WRC].”
The pair entered five WRC rounds in the Peugeot – taking a best result of 17th in Finland – before doing the Network Q for Prodrive in a Subaru Impreza WRC. A deal was then in place to do seven rounds in a third Impreza in 2002, but this collapsed after the events of 9/11 forced their investor to keep his hands in his pockets.
While Agnew kept ties with Prodrive and guided Martin Rowe to the 2003 PWRC title, Wearden “fell out” with rallying with his career effectively over.
But this year Wearden has made a mini-comeback after buying the
Hyundai i20 Top Gear magazine developed for Wales Rally GB in 2014.
He took a class victory and fifth overall on the Questmead Stages back in March, before competing on the North West Stages and Greystoke Stages.
“Obviously closed-roads at the moment is a big thing in England, and I got a phone call saying the North West Stages was happening, and one of the stages was literally two miles from my back door,” explains Wearden, after finishing 32nd overall on the event.
“So that then lit the fire again, and I couldn’t have the event go on and not be a part of it. The road sections go past my front door, so I’d have had to have gone on holiday for a week, totally ignored it!
“But talk about pressure, I’ve never, ever felt more pressure than I did on the North West Stages for some reason, and still to this day can’t pinpoint exactly why.”
Although rallying is no longer a career for Wearden he still enjoys competing and it runs in the family, as his 16-yearold son, Nathan, has competed in two rallies himself.
But there remains a thought of what could have been, and Agnew is under no illusions about what the pair could have achieved if things had gone in their favour. “Neil was definitely a world champion in the making if you think of Burnsie [Richard Burns], Marcus Gronholm in his later days not in his early days,” he says.
“When you’ve got somebody so relaxed, so car sympathetic, so methodical and just a thinking man and really quick, he had all the components to become a world champion it’s just a shame that we couldn’t make that happen.”