WILLIAM HILL: THE ASPHALT GIANTKILLER USING A FIESTA RALLY3
Armed with a Ford Fiesta Rally3, Will Hill is one of the rising stars of the Protyre Asphalt Rally Championship as he slays giants. Paul Lawrence caught up with him
Thirty-year old William Hill from Worcester is one of the leading contenders in the Protyre pack even though his Rally3 Fiesta sets him at an immediate disadvantage against the Rally2 and R5 cars in the championship.
In truth, Rally3 has yet to take off domestically despite growing international support. With less power, less aero and less development in other areas, the Rally3 is still a cracking package and offers great performance for around half the cost of buying and running a Rally2. Hill is a big advocate for the class and wants more people to join him.
The Hill rallying story goes back two more generations via Will’s father Tim and grandfather Mike to the days when their business was Brooklyn Ford and they were running rally cars for Gwyndaf Evans and Phil Collins.
Will was soon getting involved: “I always had a passion for motorsport and always wanted to be involved, although when I was a little kid I was very scared of the noise. My first experience in a rally car was when we went up to M-Sport for a Greystoke Castrol Rally Day in the Focus WRC car.
“I jumped in and I was crying my eyes out as I didn’t want to get in it because it was too noisy. They eventually managed to settle me down and got me in the car. I went round Greystoke in this Focus and loved every second of it!”
Next was autograss for a couple of years in a 1000cc Mini and then a
Vauxhall Corsa-engined special where he learned some racecraft. “We then went karting for probably seven or eight years but we were a bit late for the juniors,” explains the driver.
Will’s father and uncle Richard then bought a Fiesta ST as they hadn’t been rallying for probably 20 years due to children and business getting in the way.
Hill Jr says: “I wanted to have a go at that, so did my first event and absolutely loved it. Dad said: ‘We need to get you to do a proper event so we’ll do Epynt’.”
That was in 2015 and Jamie Vaughan was co-driving.“On stage two we had quite a big accident and rolled,” explains Hill. “We had a night in Merthyr Tydfil hospital and the car was a write off.”
To add further insult, his overalls were cut off in hospital. “The next day dad picked me up and on the way home we stopped at Nicky Grist’s to get some more overalls and a new helmet,” he explains.
The next year, 2016, they did the
Asphalt championship in a Fiesta R200 and won their class, which was followed by a gravel season with the BTRDA.
“In the last five or six years, with Covid, it wasn’t really appropriate to be out rallying with so much going on. By
2022 we were getting a little bit back to normality,” says Hill.
The first step was looking at a Rally2 or R5 car. “It’s the expense and the running costs,” he says. “As quick as they are, we might still be doing one or two events a year. Then the Rally3 package came out and we watched it for probably 12 months. Rally3 was the better way to go. We can look after it and do it all ourselves. For a Rally2 you’ve got to have a proper team.
“M-Sport had a test day in Greystoke and invited me to have a go in it. So I had a spin round and kind of fell in love with the car from there. It’s a super little package.”
There was a two-month lead time and they went to Poland to collect a new Fiesta Rally3. Hill explains: “We had two weeks to get the car ready for the 2022 Jim Clark and it was a rush. We had to do the whole rally on five rims as that’s all we had. Luckily the weather wasn’t too mixed and we managed to finish 15th overall.
“Last year we thought, we’ve got this car and we’re not using it. Let’s do a championship. So we decided to do the Protyre Asphalt Championship and absolutely loved it. We had a super year.”
That stellar season included sixth on the Manx and seventh in Dunoon along with a class victory and fourth overall in the Protyre ranks against all the Rally2 and R5 cars. On the opening 2024 event, the North West Stages, Hill finished 15th overall and won his class by half a minute. Of the 34 Rally2 and R5 cars that finished, 20 of them were behind the Rally3 Fiesta.
“A lot of people are rushing to buy older-spec R5s when actually these are just as competitive now,” says Hill. “And if everyone’s in the same car, it would be a great little class to run in. I really want more people in these cars to give some competition. You’ve got to keep the thing on the limiter the whole way but it’s a great little package. With 230-235bhp it does miss the power and you probably want another 40 or 50bhp to be where the R5s are. But it is half the cost to buy and run compared to a Rally2 and we can run it ourselves.
“The good thing with M-Sport support is that we can download the data, send it off to Poland and next day I’ve got feedback on it. Last year we had a few issues with getting parts out of Poland but I think for any new product like this parts availability is always going to be tough. The more people that run the car, the better the parts supply is going to be.
“There’s people going and buying an R5 or a Rally2 and they could have just as much fun and just as much competition in one of these. We’ve done a couple of test days with Osian Pryce and he’s jumped in and said it’s a good package.” ■
“I want more people in this car”
Will Hill
Elfyn Evans has one. Thierry Neuville has created a business alongside his brother, designing, manufacturing and selling them. So if they’re good enough for the leading two drivers in the World Rally Championship, surely they’re good enough for the UK too? WRC2 co-driver James Morgan and EDSL Sport boss Alex Waterman certainly think so.
The subject is the FIA Cross Car.
The plan is to create a rallysprint championship, hopefully as early as 2025. The vision is to offer rally drivers a far more cost-effective way to compete, and budding young stars the perfect platform to build their skills for a potential future rallying career. Conversations are deep with Motorsport UK to make this happen, and speaking to Morgan and Waterman it’s easy to understand why.
“The problem I personally see with rallying is the cost: it’s become too expensive, miles out of reach of the average working man,” Morgan tells Motorsport News. “I suppose even a cross car is still quite an expensive toy, but the running costs are maybe 5% of a Rally4 car. It’s the ability to be able to use it, and they’re a very good training tool for young drivers.”
Waterman adds: “They teach you how to set a car up. So many people ask for a quote to go rallying and then go ‘aw no that’s way too expensive’ but these go much quicker than a Rally4 car and give you all the things you need to be able to drive a rally car fast. Ultimately it’s a no brainer, but it’s about getting bums on seats for people to realise that.”
As Waterman describes it: “Cross cars were solely designed to be a cheap way for rally drivers to keep their hand in and to train, at the extremes.”
That’s exemplified by the world’s best using them in between events – including even F1 World champion Fernando Alonso – and the FIA Rally Star programme utilising them to determine its global finalists. Although these lightweight, buggy-like machines are now regularly racing – including in both the 5 Nations British and BTRDA Clubmans rallycross championships in the UK – they are perfectly adept for rallying too. There just hasn’t been anybody running a championship of that ilk yet.
“This rallysprint format is quite popular in Europe, especially in Estonia, Spain and Portugal, and I started to ask a few of my rally friends ‘would they be interested in buying them?’ initially with the thought of would people buy a cross car and go rallycross racing. But a lot of the rally guys were not keen to race wheel-towheel with people – they’re rallying people, not racing people,” Morgan explains. “Basically any rally that runs in the UK, they could potentially run at. The Circuit Rally Championship, a few of those rounds maybe. A dream let’s say would be to have three or four single-venue rallies and three or four rallysprint-type events on gravel. And then the idea of the championship is for it to be control tyres, control fuel, so everybody has the same.”
Morgan currently runs and sells cross cars from Mygale, while Waterman’s EDSL Sport firm is the UK distributor for Thierry Neuville’s LifeLive machines.
“The beauty of them is that they’re multi-discipline, multi-surface,” Waterman argues. “You could go and do a sprint or hillclimb on pure Tarmac, and you could then go to Sweet Lamb and rag it round there on pure gravel. And you can go between the two without changing anything, all you would need to do is change springs if that. Even the tyres are all-purpose.”
But why create a rallysprint championship with them? “You look at all the other European countries and they’ve all got one or two real promising hotshots coming up, and for a population of 70 million people it’s kind of embarrassing that we in the UK haven’t been able to find one,” Morgan says. “Hopefully creating a championship would help address that problem.”
The 2022 British Rally champion Osian Pryce can see the value. He competed in a rallysprint in Sardinia last year and helped demonstrate Morgan and Waterman’s concept to Motorsport UK at Anglesey’s
Lee Holland Stages in March.
From the driving seat, Pryce says “it’s probably more fun than a Rally2 car” while being perfect for developing or maintaining driving techniques.
“It is essentially like a dynamic mini-Rally2 car,” adds Pryce. “If your technique’s wrong, it doesn’t work, so it’s a good way of perfecting your skills and getting good seat time. There’s so much you can do to teach people in one of them and it translates to a rally car. It’s just about weight transfer, positioning and your braking and cornering technique.”
And as for the idea of a rallysprint championship? “It’s a good idea,” Pryce says. “When I was in Sardinia, a prime example was Pepe Lopez. He nearly won WRC2 in Monte
Carlo, he’s only a couple of years younger than me and he started off in one of them when he was a youngster, so we’re a little bit late discovering it.
At the end of the day, do you think somebody like Thierry Neuville would bother with it if it was no good? That’s my answer. He’s made a successful business out of it because there’s people willing to give it a go.”
Next steps depend on how conversations advance with Motorsport UK, but the case is compelling: offers drivers a more affordable way to compete, that should in-turn help foster young talent in a competitive setting.
Morgan concludes: “Rallying has been on a decline but it’s picking back up again in this country, thanks to Motorsport UK’s efforts with the likes of the British Rally Championship.
But I feel like we can offer something new to help the next generation.
“Cross cars have a lot of the same modifications as high-end rally cars in terms of sequential gearboxes, quite advanced dampers, you have all the same set-up choices. It’s never going to take over from rallying, but for younger kids who are trying to make it in rallying, it might be part of the tools they need in order to become more competitive at a higher level. And for others, it’s great seat time and fantastic fun for a fraction of the cost of a rally car.” ■
“The costs are 5% of a rally car”
James Morgan