Remembering a tense British season
Why the 2011 British Rally Championship was a watershed for Scot David Bogie
At first glance, there’s nothing particularly vintage about the 2011 British Rally Championship season. Although the title battle was still alive on the final round, it was essentially a foregone conclusion, and the star names like Mark and David Higgins, Guy Wilks and Gwyndaf Evans had evaporated from the series.
But dig a little deeper and actually, 2011 was a rather significant year that is often (wrongfully) overlooked. David Bogie became British Rally champion at the tender age of just 24, creating a nice slice of history as the only Scotsman outside the McRae clan to take the crown.
To make the success that bit sweeter, he became the first, and so far only, driver to win both the Scottish and British titles in the same year too.
It was also current Toyota World
Rally Championship star Elfyn Evans’s breakthrough season at a national level as he stepped up to four-wheel drive. A title-winning return in 2016 aside, 2011 was Evans’s last full season competing nationally before making the jump into the world scene. The third challenger was Northern Ireland’s Jonny Greer who had led the points heading into the 2010 finale before Keith Cronin won. Greer represented the new breed of cars in a
Skoda Fabia S2000 against Bogie and Evans’s Group N machines. But it would be the last the BRC would see of either specification of cars for a good few years as the series was exclusively for two-wheel-drive cars from 2012.
Rallye Sunseeker was an all-new round to kick off the 2011 season in February, but the pre-season shenanigans were in full swing long before that. Whispers were that Super 2000 cars were going to be the ones to have, as proved by Craig Breen’s performances in a Ford Fiesta the year before. While Bogie admits “we did look at Super 2000 but we didn’t look at it for very long” before committing to running his own Mitsubishi Lancer E9, Greer took a different stand.
“At that stage there was a bit of a crossover,” Greer says. “The chat was everyone was going to go Super 2000 so we were still, even January time, very much in two camps as to whether to stick with the E9 or try and go Super 2000. We had seen a car for sale from Raimund Baumschlager and it went from there. The S2000 car was faster than the Group N so, on paper, that gave us an advantage so we did think it would be a successful season. We knew it would be tough to try and make the S2000 car work but we still believed it was the best way to go.”
There would be teething problems, and Greer and the other Fabia S2000 of Robert Barrable would only manage sixth and seventh respectively on the opening round. “With the very wet nature of the stages the cars just didn’t have the torque to work with the Group N machinery of that time,” remembers Greer.
The Sunseeker would set the tone for the year. Bogie, fresh from winning the first round of the Scottish series, fended off a 19-year-old Tom Cave to clinch his first BRC win.
“We had no intention of doing both championships and won the first round of each,” Bogie says. “It kind of went from there. We had a good car and it was one of those years where really I could do no wrong.”
However, it wasn’t Bogie bossing the scene on the second round: Bulldog International Rally of North Wales. This was the event that Evans had received his Pirelli Star Driver nomination on the previous year that allowed him to win the shootout and contest the 2011 season in a Pirelli-backed Subaru Impreza. Adam Gould’s sister car was out of the traps the quickest in ’11, but as soon as the rally headed into Dyfi forest Evans hit the front. He and co-driver Andrew Edwards claimed their first BRC win on their local stages and were followed home by Bogie, who held a narrow two-point series lead.
“I don’t think anybody expected us to win,” Edwards admits. “There was no pressure on us. It [Pirelli Star Driver prize] was a opportunity and that’s how we looked at it. And if you look at the season, OK we won Rally North Wales but it was more local knowledge because obviously [on the] Pirelli, the third round, Bogie was strong again.”
Evans was keeping Bogie honest in the early phases in Kielder but the Mitsubishi had the edge, opening up a 12.8-second advantage before Evans’s event unravelled with a puncture and power steering problems. Bogie wouldn’t relent though, sweeping to 10 stage wins from 13 to record a dominant 1m02.1s victory over Barrable’s Skoda.
Despite an alternator problem that robbed Greer of his lights in the dark on the opening evening, he finished third. He would go one better on the Jim Clark Rally’s asphalt tests a month later, but it could have been more.
“We got caught out on the first night on slicks in the rain and dropped a pile of time on the first run through Abbey St
Bathans,” Greer explains. “That was the one that got away because it would’ve set us up for the rest of the season. The Saturday was bone dry and the S2000s had a massive advantage over the Group N car so we were trying to use that as best we could but David kept the pace up and held out until the end. It was a bit of a missed opportunity on our side.”
Bogie was back on a roll. Although Barrable had initially led the championship leader’s home round, he was out with alternator trouble after two stages and Bogie was in the mood, resisting Greer’s challenge to close out a third win from four rounds. To top it all off, the next day he won the Scottish championship round on the same stages in a Metro 6R4. “When we won the Sunseeker, people sat up and thought ‘bloody hell’ so we had a lot of support,” Bogie recalls. “On the Scottish round, I can still remember, there were so many people out on the stages cheering us on.”
There was then a near three month layoff between the Jim Clark and the Ulster Rally, and the narrative of the season began to switch. With Evans a quiet fourth in Scotland, Bogie had a 12-point lead and had it all to lose. He says: “I’d got to the stage where I’d done all the hard work with three wins and a second place, and I thought now I need to be consistent.
That was my plan in Ulster. It was a conservative drive. I thought if I come here and don’t salvage any points I’m
“It seemed I could do no wrong that year” David Bogie
going to be back in the fight whereas at that stage I had a healthy lead.”
So with Bogie not setting the timing screens alight, who would? Given his asphalt form a round earlier, Greer would’ve been a safe bet but his agonising year continued in Northern Ireland.
He was forced to upgrade his Fabia from Evo 1 to Evo 2 spec in line with
FIA homologation rules – a performance advantage yes but it meant he was once again unfamiliar with his steed. A broken front driveshaft on the first day pegged him back to fourth at the finish, one spot behind Bogie.
He did at least better than Evans, despite the Welshman’s pace. A puncture on the rally’s first stage left Evans 2m44.1s adrift of the lead from the get-go, and that was a gap not even his nine stage wins from 13 could overcome. Instead, the stage was set for Marty McCormack to steal the show. The local lad led from the outset and wouldn’t budge, sealing an unlikely victory in his Citroen DS3 R3 – the first for a two-wheel-drive car in the BRC since 2000. “To do that was fantastic,” says McCormack. “It was a big thing to tick that box for everybody.”
McCormack was doing more than ticking boxes though, he was dominating; and not just in Ulster. Skipping the opening round as a deal was still being finalised, McCormack was second in class behind Mark Donnelly’s Renault Clio in Wales which he thought was a reasonable return on his first rally with a professional team and a new car. Perhaps not. “A few days later I got a phone call and it was a guy at Citroen, and the ballsing he gave me for getting beat by a Clio!” McCormack reveals. “His words were ‘I wish you’d have wrecked the car instead’and I was like ‘oh my God is this what being involved in a factory’s like?’”
It was all upward from there as McCormack would go on to win the class on the remaining four rounds and seal a superb fourth overall in the championship. Testing for Ulster had been interesting though, as Citroen Sport was adamant McCormack should use Bryan Bouffier’s set-up after he had given the DS3 R3 its debut pre-homologation on the rally 12 months earlier. But McCormack wanted less toe in at the rear to make the car more stable over the Irish bumps. What followed was a tale that echoes Petter Solberg on Corsica 2003 and Thierry Neuville on Rally Germany 2014.
“The car was set-up more for turning in than it was straightline speed over bumps,” McCormack remembers.
“They adjusted what they felt was right. I approached a section over the mountain where I knew I took this section flat in fifth in the C2 [the year before], so I went to take it flat in fifth in the DS. The thing went a little bit wrong, we ended up going into the hedge and rolled the car down into the moss. The boys got the car fixed but I got my own way with the geometry!”
McCormack’s victory teed him up for the two-wheel-drive title on the season finale: Trackrod Rally Yorkshire. Bogie was well placed, leading the standings by 14 points over Evans with just 20 left to claim. However Bogie wasn’t taking any chances despite the comfortable points situation. “We were carrying spare parts of everything,” Bogie says. “It was just a case of running the car full of fuel, full of tools, full of parts and just getting it round.”
Going into the final stage, Langdale, Bogie was lying third behind Greer and eventual rally winner Evans – the only man who could at that point spoil Bogie’s party. But halfway through the stage he had to wind the window down as he was shaking and feeling sick.
“It was a hell of a pressure, I’ve never felt pressure like that before because we were so close,” he explains. “We finished on the podium and it all came good [but] I was starting to think about it, and I’ve learned since then. I go into the first corner the same as I go into the last corner.
“There’s only ever been four Scotsman to win: all three McRaes and then myself. So that’s something I’m quite proud of,” Bogie adds. “It’s probably the highlight of my career.”
Edwards believes he and Evans could’ve fought Bogie and Rae closer had lady luck been kinder: “Ulster was the one that got away,” he says. “There’s a good chance we’d have won that rally which then would’ve put us in a better place – there’d have been a big shootout then on the Trackrod. Things would have panned out very differently if the season would have run its course [including the Manx] and we hadn’t had that puncture on Ulster.”
Greer doesn’t look back on 2011 with much fondness either, confessing: “It wasn’t driving the car properly and it was kind of like a [vicious] circle. Coming from the Group N car which was a lot more sedate and you had to be gentle with it, with the S2000 car you had to grab it by the scruff of the neck. I had no confidence, the car wouldn’t go fast.
“I can’t apportion any blame to anybody but myself that season, it’s just I didn’t perform. Yes, we had a few unlucky things with mechanicals but even with that we had the car advantage to do it.
“David had a great season, he was the complete opposite of me: when he needed to perform he performed. When I needed to perform, I didn’t.”