SPECIAL CELEBRATION EVENT TO REMEMBER MCRAE’S TITLE FOR KNOCKHILL
Knockhill will host a 25th anniversary celebration of Colin Mcrae’s World Rally Championship title success in September next year.
The event, planned for September 26-27 next year and previewed at next week’s BTCC race at the Fife track, will include an invitation-only rally aimed at bringing some of the discipline’s biggest stars together to remember Mcrae’s 1995 title.
The competitive action will be book-ended by a rally forum on the Friday evening and a celebration dinner once the stages are done on Saturday night – where the achievements of Mcrae’s father and brother, Jimmy and Alister – will also be recognised. The organisers plan the centrepiece of the day to be a parade of Mcrae’s rally cars from throughout his career.
Mcrae made history on the
1995 RAC Rally, when his second consecutive victory on Britain’s round of the world championship clinched a maiden world title for a British driver.
Scotland’s premier circuit hosted a similar celebration five years ago, when the rally was won fittingly by Alister Mcrae in a Proton Satria. While the 2015 event ran within the confines of the Knockhill circuit, there are plans to take next year’s rally outside the track and into the surrounding forests.
Mcrae drove and rode Knockhill on numerous occasions – the most famous outing coming when he made a guest BTCC appearance in a BMW 318i run by his then fulltime rally employer Prodrive. Qualifying 15th and finishing eighth in the first race made for a largely undramatic BTCC race debut. That all changed a few hours later when the rain arrived and left Mcrae chasing Matt Neal’s M3. The then-british Rally Champion used the back of Neal’s BMW to slow his own car down for the hairpin.
That led to a frank exchange of views between Prodrive’s David Richards and Matt Neal’s dad Steve, while Mcrae hid in the motorhome.
Both parties mellowed in the ensuing years, with Mcrae later telling MN: “Running back to the paddock was probably the quickest I went all weekend!”
Celebrations of Mcrae’s achievements have provided some of the rallying’s genuine highlights in recent years, with an unprecedented number of world champions and stars of rallying competing at the Colin Mcrae Stages in Perthshire in 2008, the year after the helicopter accident which claimed the lives of Mcrae, his son Johnny and two family friends.
Two years ago virtually every World Rally champion attended Rallylegend in San Marino to remember the Scot.