Full steam ahead with 2024 BRC project
A rally as rough and demanding as the Safari shouldn’t have pandered to McRae’s naturally flamboyant style. Yet over time, Kenya became one of his best rallies.
The Toyota Yaris Rally2, Meirion Evans, Chris Ingram, Castrol and Melvyn Evans Motorsport: it is a potent recipe for this year’s British Rally Championship.
BRC success is not something new to the team. Matt Edwards (2021) and Osian Pryce (2022) both won the title in Polo R5s from MEM. Can either
Evans Junior or Ingram make it three from four this year?
“With the support of Castrol we can put a lot into the car and get the best drivers in the cars. The two of them are good drivers,” says Melvyn Evans.
However, opening-round winner Ingram is not due to get his Yaris until round three, the Jim Clark Rally in May. He’s running a Polo R5 in the interim.
Evans Sr says that his two drivers will work well together: “They started in Juniors together when they were
14. So they’ve always been good mates. And I think they’ve grown well, so one driver can bounce ideas off the other. I’m hoping we’ve got a really good team between us and by the end of the year we can do a couple of WRC events. If things go well, that’s what I’m aiming for.
“The events in the BRC aren’t massive. They are shortish events that are close to home. I think what the BRC has done is probably good to get people back into it. And then they have a springboard into next year. But it gives us the time and hopefully a bit of budget that we can use to do some other things as well.
“We’re going to do a bit in Ireland. That’s a big market for Rally2 cars and that’s part of the agreement we have with Toyota, that we go and do into a couple of rallies in
Ireland and get a set-up to work there. If we prove the cars are good then hopefully they’ll have customers from Ireland to buy them.”
However, there won’t be an immediate rush for cars as there is up to a one-year wait for a new order. “They’re going to build so many cars in the first year for teams and they’re not going to go overboard. They want to make sure that the product works and get it right,” adds Evans.
Of Colin McRae’s 25 World Rally Championship wins, how many do you reckon weren’t claimed on fast, committed rallies that so perfectly suited his legendary flat-out driving style? One? Maybe two? Try 10 – or in other words, just under half.
For the flamboyant Scot never won on Sweden or Finland’s super-fast stages (although he was something of an expert in New Zealand), but instead found his most success on the stiflingly rough and demanding gravel stages of the Acropolis and the Safari.
As a statistic it feels as astonishing as the ultra-smooth and precise Richard Burns never winning on Tarmac (but, amazingly, that’s also true). To many, McRae’s entire legend was of this onthe-edge driver throwing his Impreza or Focus into corners at impossible angles as he sped on to victory – that is if he didn’t crash in the process of trying. Reality somewhat alters that picture.
In fact, as time wore on and a partnership with Nicky Grist started to blossom, McRae was arguably at his best when a gentle approach was required – not when outright speed was the only answer.
“All his worst events became his best events,” Grist tells MN. “You’ve got Safari, you’ve got Acropolis, you’ve got Cyprus, you’ve got Argentina – all renowned as being tough, car-breaking events if you let them. And at the end he excelled in those events. To win Safari three times, Acropolis five times – four times with me – at the end of the day everything just fell into place.”
But it was no coincidence that McRae, a driver famed for his no-nonsense attitude and swashbuckling prowess behind the wheel, became something of an expert on the WRC’s rough rounds. The Scot always possessed an innate ability to understand, and protect, any vehicle he was at the controls of, but staying patient and knowing when to push (and perhaps more pertinently when not to) had to be learned as his career progressed. When Grist replaced Derek Ringer as McRae’s right-hand man in 1997, he was already a World champion with eight WRC wins. But only one of those (Acropolis 1996) was claimed on rough terrain.
“Before I joined him I knew he was really fast,” Grist remembers, “but when we did the recce [for our first Safari]
I could see that something was needed in his pacenotes to help control some of that speed and we introduced the system in there which allowed him to grade how slow he goes. And I think that’s what made the difference basically.”
Between 1997-2002 when McRae and Grist worked together, the pair were victorious 17 times. In those six years they won the Acropolis four times and the Safari thrice. New Zealand – an event McRae dominated three times on the bounce before Grist joined him – was never won again, and GB was only claimed once.
Demanding rallies such as the Safari became McRae’s speciality. “It was surprising how many parts of that system we introduced for Africa, which was by far the most extreme event that we did in the World championship, he took into different areas of other events which allowed him to excel in, finish and compete strongly on too,” Grist says.
It all boiled down to pacenotes. Anyone who’s ever played any iteration of Colin McRae Rally will inadvertently be familiar with the 1995 World champion’s system, which graded corners from one to six. But extra words were added to help temper McRae’s pace in the superdemanding sections of the Safari.
Grist explains: “Colin always had a number system relating to gears, so six being flat out and one being the slowest. But obviously we had to introduce a descriptive system using words like fast, medium, bad, slow, stop, and then describing the conditions that we were driving over. And then with those words, mixed in with the condition, he knew what gear and speed he needed to take in the given conditions. The numbering system was still there because you still had to describe the severity of the corners. But the system we introduced to Africa was in addition to his normal pacenote system.”
How much of a difference did it realistically make? “I think it gave him the confidence that everything was mapped out so clearly and he knew exactly what he was approaching and what speed he needed to take, and also quite often what side of the road he had to drive on to escape the worst of the conditions,” Grist responds. “It just mapped everything out so clearly in front of him, and at the end of the day it just allowed him just to drive on that knowing he was going to get through with next to no problem and at the end of the day pull off the victories.”
McRae and Grist’s first Safari win fell on their first attempt at it together in 1997, which also marked their first-ever WRC win as a pairing. “We were very confident about things and once we’d done our test on Windy Corner and we did quite a few kilometres testing the new pacenote system and testing the car, we were pretty much on-song,” Grist remarks. “And then it allowed us then for the recce at least to be able to plot our way through the rally route. We were third after the first day, but by the time we’d done the first section on day two which was just under 154km, which we nicknamed the ‘road to hell’, we turned around a deficit into what was at that point a healthy lead.”
It wasn’t all plain-sailing – McRae encountered a stone wall in the middle of a section, which necessitated some major repairs at service that the Subaru mechanics were able to complete with just 30 seconds of penalties. Perhaps a lucky escape, but the pair made their own luck with an inspired decision on the aforementioned ‘road to hell’ when they deliberately checked into a time control two minutes late. That earned them a 20s penalty, but in turn gave them an extra two-minute gap between them and
Burns ahead on the road, meaning dust wasn’t a problem like it was for others.
“Do you know what? I can’t remember that!,” Grist laughs. But he can remember the win, and the feeling that their new pacenote system was there to stay. “Colin just took it and it went from strength to strength from then on really.” McRae said at the time: “I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t have put a bet on me for this event, so it’s nice to prove them wrong.”
McRae and Grist’s 1998 Safari victory attempt was undone by an engine problem, but they returned to the top step in 1999, now driving for Ford. It was a truly standout victory considering it was just the third event for the brand-new
“It allowed Colin to drive the stages with confidence”
Nicky Grist
Focus WRC – and McRae didn’t win a single stage!
“I think it’s quite memorable for quite a few people because of not being fastest,” Grist agrees, “just being happy with his pace and staying patient and waiting for people in front to have their problems. And that’s what happened. Sometimes people were much quicker than us, but then they would run into problems and lose a shitload of time which then just played into our hands.
“At the end of the day it was almost a 15-minute difference between first and second place, so that was really what Malcolm [Wilson] regards as one of Colin’s greatest-ever victories. The one thing Malcolm always says was Carlos [Sainz] was complaining to
Ove [Andersson, Toyota boss] ‘how can this new car keep going? It can’t keep going! There’s no way he’s going to be able to get to the finish’but it just was perfect, Colin drove it well.
“The car was strong, we knew it was strong because we did a Chateau Lastours test, and it really was strong. But the endurance of Africa and everything Africa throws at you, you just don’t know exactly what was going to happen. But as it was, I think we had one puncture, that’s all. We just kept cracking on.”
The third and final Safari win in 2002 wasn’t a ‘first’like the other two, rather a ‘last’as it marked McRae and Grist’s final WRC win together. But it was memorable also for McRae’s famous deviation off the road and up a bank in front of the TV cameras; a tactic Grist says came from his time working with Juha Kankkunen at Toyota.
He shares: “I knew from speaking to Juha when I partnered him, he talked about things Bjorn Waldegard used to do, who really was a Safari expert, and about how he would actually drive off the road and up the side of the road on much quicker and smoother ground. A lot of the roads are regraded so in some cases the road is below the levels of the fields and everything else to the side. So when it does rain, all the rain falls into these channels so the surface then becomes complete and utter wet, muddy, bogs basically. Juha said one year they were stuck in this one trench and next minute you could see up the top of this bank Waldegard came and just shot past the four people that were stuck in this channel!
“In 2002 we had this one particular section in an agricultural area down towards Nairobi and the road was pretty much destroyed. There were a lot of ruts and heavy boulders and rocks exposed, and I said to Colin ‘look up on the left here.’There was this flat field that had been ploughed and it was looking pretty smooth, so we just went back and had a look and I said ‘we could go up here.’ He said ‘I think we can go a bit earlier still’ so we had a look at it, made the notes and off we went. Lo and behold, who was filming there, completely unaware what we were going to do? The Channel 4 team, because it was exposed, they could see everything and next minute here we are, blasting off the road, into this field and just flat out going down the side of this rough road for a few hundred metres and then came back on a much smoother part, and off we went. All of this meant you were looking after the car but in this particular case gaining a lot of time too.”
It was a win-win. Maybe success on the more technical rallies doesn’t perfectly fit the McRae legend, but it’s only right that such a special driver should find so much success on such a special event. Grist holds his Safari triumphs dear: “To be honest it’s my favourite rally by far in the World championship. Don’t get me wrong I really enjoy a lot of other rallies, but this one particularly
“I really loved the challenge of it – everything about it, the way you have to think outside the box, the way that you prepared for it, taking the appropriate action to make sure you keep going is what paid dividends. A lot of people just couldn’t handle the fact of going slow and thinking they’re losing or haemorrhaging all this time but you just had to be patient and wait for the rally to come to you. And it generally did.” ■