MAPPING OUT A ROUTE TO GLOBAL DOMINATION
Robert Reid answers MN readers’ questions
Luke Barry poses the Motorsport News readers’ questions to Richard Burns’ right-hand man, Robert Reid
Richard Burns crossed the line of the final stage in Margam Park, released his right hand from the steering wheel of his Subaru Impreza WRC and grabbed his co-driver. “You’re the best in the world!” he shouted, lifting Robert Reid’s arm aloft. From then on in, Reid’s name would be in the history books forever. Starting out as a driver before switching seats in the mid ’80s, Reid has co-driven for fellow Scotsmen Colin Mcrae, Alister Mcrae and Robbie Head in the past but it was that relationship with Burns that he’s renowned for. Linking up in 1991, the pair went on to claim the 1993 British and 2001 World titles for Subaru; also driving for Mitsubishi and Peugeot in the WRC and amassing 10 victories.
He may have conquered the gruelling Safari Rally twice and the demanding Rally of Great Britain thrice, but here Reid faces his sternest challenge yet: the Motorsport News’ readers’ questions. Speaking of Safari…
Question: “Which of your 10 World Rally Championship victories stands out as a particular highlight?”
Robert Braidwood Via email
Robert Reid: “I would have to say the first one, Safari [1998], the first proper one, as it were, because we won in New Zealand [in 1996] when it was a Formula 2-only round. But Safari, just given that it was then such an iconic, hard, difficult event. We probably spent four to five weeks in Africa between test and event so it’s a long time, it’s a hard event, it’s really tough so just getting to the end of it seems like a win by lots of other standards. So to actually go on and win the event was obviously pretty special and the pool party afterwards was good.”
MN: Was there expectation on you to win then or was it more realxed being in a support role for Tommi Makinen?
RR: “Maybe if you asked Phil Short or Andrew Cowan or DR [David Richards] about support roles they might have a different role but we were certainly very aware that the only way at that point to get experiecne was to finish rallies. You didn’t have the safety net of Rally 2 so if you went flat out and off on the second corner of the first stage you went home. That definitely had a bearing on how you approached events.”
Question: “Which performance, over a season or on a rally, do you regard as yours and Burnsie’s best?”
Bryce Arthur Via email
RR: “I think that one is relatively straightforward to answer and I would say 2001. And the reason I’d say 2001 is it didn’t start well from a reliability point of view and a car performance point of view but we never lost sight of the objective. And I think we’d learned quite a lot from the year before and I certainly believe that if we hadn’t gone and chased Marcus [Gronholm] for the win in
Finland in 2000 and ended up crashing, we possibly could have won the championship the year before.
“Over a whole season, there was one aim and that was to win the championship and that required going flat out on a number of occasions - I think we had the most fastest times of anybody that season along with the season before - and it required bagging the points at others.”
Question: “In terms of rally wins, the 2000 season was more successful than 2001. Do you feel that’s the championship you should and could’ve won?” Haydn Jones Via email
MN: Was there a stark difference in terms of approach between those seasons?
RR: “With hindsight, yes, there probably was. In 2000 we were still learning how to do it whereas in 2001 we knew how to do it, we knew what we were trying to achieve. We started 2000 with the ’99 car and then we got the 2000 car which was really successful and then everybody kind of caught up towards the end of the year a bit. But like I say, I think Finland was the pivotal point that year. If we’d settled for second we’d have been in with a fair shout [of the title].”
MN: Does that rank as one of the biggest accidents you’ve had?
RR: “We didn’t have that many big accidents. Probably that and New Zealand ’02 are the two fairly sizeable ones on rallies, there were a few in testing as well! Mind you, Australia ’98 was pretty sizeable as there was two in one rally and then less than a week later we rolled in the GB test as well. It was a bit of a crash-fest week!
“The Finland one was funny because we obviously crashed following the flying finish line and we got ourselves together, I radioed Simon our engineer and said we’ve crashed, we’re out. He said ‘yep, I’ve got your time, just give us a shout when you get five miles down the road section ’and I said ‘no we’ve crashed we’re out of the rally. ’there was silence. He said ‘no, I’ve got your time’ and I said ‘yes, but we crashed over the flying finish line so we recorded a time but the car is destroyed, upside-down in the trees. ‘Oh! ’[laughs]. It was the second quickest time [we set], I think we’d just taken the rally lead.”
Question: “Were you always confident you and Richard would come out of the Battle of Britain [Rally GB 2001] as world champions? Andy Gray Via email
MN: There’s a lot said about how Colin would play the press and try to get into Richard’s head, but I’m sure you’d agree it wasn’t necessarily like that.
RR: “I don’t think he was psyched out at all, I think Colin was psyched out. Colin’s approach – and this is not just because I knew Colin really well, everyone knew what Colin was like – he used to take big risks on the first stage with the intention of getting 10, 15 seconds or whatever on you that you would then find really hard to get back. So when it worked it was pretty devastating but when it didn’t he used to get a bit rattled.
“It didn’t really work here so we knew all we had to do was live with him. If we were 10 seconds behind him at the end of the first loop; we were quite happy, that wasn’t a problem. Richard always had a bit of a battle plan whereas Mcrae’s plan was get in the lead and stay in the lead. He took a few seconds in the first stage, we matched him or were one [second] down on the next and then we took a second.
And then we were stopped on the side of the road on the road section and Richard was actually speaking to his sports psychologist who was on the event, and part of the reason for doing was so that Colin would see it.
“And I remember Colin at one point going ‘I saw Burnsie speaking to a sports psychologist, that must be how weak he was in the head’ where as it was exactly the opposite. Richard was well prepared. If Colin had got through the stage he went off on and had taken 10, 12 seconds out of us it was going to be an uphill battle so I’m not saying we were in a comfortable position by any stretch of the imagination but it wasn’t uncomfortable.”
MN: Richard wasn’t that emotional a character but we all know his reaction when he grabbed your arm and shouted ‘you’re the best in the world!’ how did that feel?
RR: “It was amazing. The night before, the Saturday night, lots of things go through your mind and two things went through my mind. One was I don’t think I could go through what I’d gone through the year before because in 2000 we needed to win to stand a chance, but Marcus did what he needed to do. We won the rally and that was the most galling, disappointing thing that I have ever experienced in my life. So I didn’t want to do that again. And the other one was, quite interestingly, a bit of concern around if or when we won, would I want to do it again or would I not want to do it again? Because you don’t know if the motivation is to do it once or the motivation’s to keep doing it again because you’re in such a bubble that you haven’t really thought about it that much.
“One of the things which really stands out now to me is how much of everyday life I completely was unaware of at that point in time because you’re so focused on what you’re doing. So I missed both my brothers’ weddings, for example. My youngest brother, who’s five years younger than me, I have pretty much no recollection of his late teens and early twenties once I started properly rallying. I was living down south and was just focused on what I was doing. The good thing is we won and I woke up the next morning with a huge hangover but wanting to do it again.”
Question: “What was the thinking in leaving Subaru for Peugeot?”
Martin Irvine Via email
MN: Was that because you wanted new motivation or was it more than you’d spotted the capabilities of the 206 WRC?
RR: “[It was a] multi-faceted decision. When the original discussions started [with Peugeot in 2001], things were not going particularly well that year [with Subaru]. It was obviously a strong team with a huge history in WRC and it was a decent amount of money as well, so it was a very attractive offer. I remember at shakedown for New Zealand, on the way back to the hotel we said to Simon Cole, our engineer, ‘it’s not common knowledge but we’re leaving. ’it was really interesting because he said he was thinking of leaving as well, and was kind of waiting to see what we did. Simon is now chief trackside engineer at Mercedes F1, and went to BAR as it was then [in 2002]. So that kind of cemented what we were thinking too.
“We went on to win and I remember afterwards one of the team saying ‘right, now we have to pull out all the stops because now we’ve got a chance of winning the championship’ and Richard and I just looked at each other and thought ‘does that mean they’ve not been pulling out all the stops up until now? ’and you just start to think maybe the time’s there for a change and then Sanremo, we had a tyre delaminate on the way to the first stage so we changed it before the start but then we had another delaminate in the stage and we went off and retired. We came back down to Sanremo, sat down by the pool with a beer thinking ‘we’ve made the right decision. ’at the end of that year we left Subaru, Simon left Subaru and Christian Loriaux left Subaru [for M-sport Ford]. So there was quite a change really.”
Question: “What could Richard have gone on to achieve had he not fallen ill?”
Luke Munro Via email
MN: It’s important to remember he was in a very good position to win that 2003 title and then, of course, you were going to go back to Subaru the year after…
RR: “Yeah I honestly believe if he hadn’t [fallen ill we would’ve won]. In ’03 we finished third in Finland and Petter [Solberg] beat us to second after a battle on the last day. And I remember at the end of it saying to Steve Benton, Richard’s trainer, ‘that shouldn’t have happened. There’s something, I don’t know what’s up, but that should not have happened. ’and Steve was saying ‘yeah I think he’s just a bit tired. ’and it was quite a long season ’03 from memory and we were just going into a whole load of events; I think three events in four weekends with Sanremo, Corsica and Spain. So if we’d finished second in Finland, gone on to perform in Sanremo, Corsica and Spain, arguably we could’ve possibly wrapped the championship up before GB or been in a really strong position for GB.
“Then as you say it was back to Subaru. We’d done a deal for two years with the obvious intention of going back to win the championship. Richard’s private plan was to do those two years, retire, take six months off in 2006 before doing some raid-type events, do Dakar ’07 and then stop. I don’t think he was one of the guys who would’ve kept going forever until nobody would employ him.”
MN: Do you ever think about what would’ve happened or do you just accept that’s how life went?
RR: “Yeah sure. I think as a package we both brought a lot to a team and for Richard it was more than just getting in the car, driving it quick and shouting at the team if it wasn’t good. It was actually working with the team to ensure it was the best car and on several occasions people said to Richard ‘you’ve been really lucky in your career because you always ended up in the best car’ and it’s a question that really annoyed him because he would say ‘do you not think I had a hand in deciding which was going to be the best car and positioning myself to create that situation? And do you not think I’ve then worked with the team in order to make sure it is the best car?’
“We led Germany after the first day in ’03 and we were sitting in the time control at the first service and David Lapworth strolled up to the car, opened Richard’s door and said ‘do you fancy a pint in the local pub on Wednesday night? ’burnsie was like ‘yeah I think I can do that’ and that was kind of the informal, tentative approach. I think one of the things Subaru had recognised was Richard’s methodical style and that was something that they felt the team could benefit from.”
Question: “Did you ever consider returning to WRC competition and did you ever look at things like team management?”
Richard Lawrence Via email
RR: “My main, initial priority, subconsciously, was to support Richard. I spent three or four days a week with him
for the best part of two years. I also got a little bit involved in some driver management and started doing some work with a guy called Paul Turner who was managing Markko [Martin] and also Chris Atkinson. So Paul and I brokered that deal for Chris to go to Subaru and I remember they suggested I should co-drive for Chris. But for me, realistically the risk of going back with a young driver and the financial reward just didn’t make sense. And also for me, that’s another eight to 10 year commitment because you don’t start on a journey like that and then decide after a couple of years you don’t really want to do it, just when the driver’s at a critical point. I was still involved with Paul and then Beef [Michael Park] got killed, Markko stopped, and by that time I had other projects which meant I was less involved.”
Question: “What was it like co-driving Markko Martin on the Richard Burns Memorial Rally in 2008, especially when you’d both lost someone close to you?”
Paul Rodgers Via email
RR: “Yeah it was [a poignant match] and possibly even at other levels than the question is asking. Markko, Richard and myself always got on really, really well. Beef was a mate of Richard and I from Peugeot Challenge as Beef did it with Steve Bennett, who’s doing the historic stuff now. Beef started doing some gravel notes for Richard and I and then got a chance, because he was known around WRC, with Abdullah Bakhashab which then led to working with Toyota Sweden and then obviously Markko came along and that led to Beef working with Markko in the Corolla. So Beef and Markko, Wrc-wise, were probably the people, other than Colin, that we hung out most with so we were all really, really close.
“When Richard took ill, we’d done a test for GB in ’03 and Richard definitely wasn’t himself. He drove back to London because he was going to some party that he couldn’t really get out of and I just stayed up in Cardiff. As he was leaving home to go back up, he got a call from Markko just to say he’d landed at Heathrow so Richard picked Markko up and they drove to Cardiff together. So when Richard collapsed at the wheel, it was actually Markko that had steered the car into the hard shoulder. There’s obviously a big connection there and Beef and Markko came to see Richard quite a lot actually when he was ill. That’s the only time that I’ve sat in a rally car since the GB test. I think for the cause and with Markko, and probably with Subaru that kind of triangle, was the probably the only way that I was ever going to do it.”
Question: “You used to drive rally cars, so why did you switch to co-driving?”
Colin Evans Via email
RR: “Because I wasn’t that good a driver, and I couldn’t afford it! The third reason is I was quite good at the navigating bit. I’d been doing a lot of navigational events in Scotland and actually some down in the Lake District as well so I knew my way about an Ordnance Survey map pretty well. And at that point, co-driving was about reading maps in the forest as much as anything else so I was pretty good at that and I enjoyed it. The driving bit, I was at uni and then just starting to work in the family farming business. I suppose if I’d had limitless budget and could’ve afforded to crash then I would’ve explored the limits a bit more. But I think what’s quite interesting is drivers that have co-driven and drivers that have driven, as long as you then stick to what you’re actually doing, it is quite a good thing. I would never tell Richard how to drive but I would understand what he was doing and vice versa, because Richard co-drove on quite a few events.”
Question: “You’ve played a key role in the development of young drivers and you’re also a safety advocate. Why did you get involved in these areas and what more needs to be done to help improve young drivers and also improve safety?”
Fraser Clark Via email
RR: “The reason I got involved is it was very obvious to me, at the end of 2003, that Colin wasn’t going to be with Citroen in ’04 and Richard wasn’t coming back. So we’d come from a situation of two British drivers dominating certainly the UK round of the World Rally Championship and featuring heavily in rounds all around the world. And whilst there was maybe Kris Meeke, Guy Wilks, Martin Rowe; a few hovering at the next level down, it wasn’t clear where the next Richard or Colin was going to come from. I approached the [governing body, then called] Motor Sports Association at the time, [chef executive] Colin Hilton, and said ‘look you need to be doing more. Don’t take for granted that you’ve had these drivers.’ In 2001, there was a picture of a rally car on the front page of The Times newspaper four days running in
the lead up to Rally GB. There were more column inches than Damon Hill winning F1 in 1996. My intention at the time had been to spur the MSA on to do something, but I kind of ended up running a programme for them and, me being me, I can never just sit still and be happy and accepting of what’s happening. I always needed to be bigger and better, so me and my big mouth kept saying ‘we should do this, we should do that, we should do the next thing.’ Colin then retired and things lost a little bit of momentum and I was kind of off doing other things, I felt I’d done my catalyst bit at that point. So that’s the background to it.
“What needs to be done now ? I think it’s really hard. You need cash. [But] these people that say you need five million quid to buy yourself three to four years in WRC, I don’t actually agree with that and I think you can do a lot for nothing or a lot quite cheaply. It’s not a silver bullet. I’ve worked with a lot of drivers from Junior 1000 drivers all the way up to guys who are now world champions and Formula 1 drivers, and the common thread with a lot of them is they’ll all probably say now ‘I wish we’d listened.’ Because there’s a lot of advice out there and the problem is some of it’s rubbish and some is not. But if you get an opportunity to talk to anyone who’s doing better in the sport that you want to succeed in, you should take it because you will learn something.
“One of my big things at the moment is work ethic. I couldn’t even talk about somebody being talented if they’re a lazy little shit. It’s not just racing, it’s life, it’s business, it’s everything and I think one of the downsides of some of the talent development programmes is that they perhaps make people think they’ve made it before they have. There is a lot that you can do but there’s a lot that isn’t being done at the moment which is quite frustrating sometimes.”
Question: “There are rumours that Rally GB will be moving away from Wales in the future. If the sport came to Scotland and you were in charge, can you give us a quick overview of what your dream route would be?”
Freddie Blackie Via email
RR: “Start on the Castle Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle. The first stage would be around Holyrood Park. It would then take in the Perthshire Trossachs and Tweed Valley and maybe even Argyll, I quite fancy a parc ferme ferry trip back to the stages in Argyll. A base maybe at something like either the SECC [in Glasgow] Eurocentral Scotland, Ingliston showground, something like that. How does that sound?”
MN: You wouldn’t be interested in heading north? You’re more interested in the Central Belt and southern Scotland?
RR: “Erm, yeah probably. I’ve done Scottish rallies based out of Perth that have done the Granite [City] stages or certainly Fetteresso, Drumtochty, all these ones but you could do a loop of Aberdeen, Inverness, Bishops Glen.”
MN: Would you be interested in organising an event like this for real?
RR: “I don’t think I would want to be the event organiser. I think there is people that are much better at doing that than I am, but I’d never want to shy away from giving an opinion!”