MN REWRITES RALLY GB ROUTE
HOW WE’D SHAKE-UP THE SHOWPIECE
What good’s a visionary without a clean sheet of paper?
The chatter about the route for this year’s Wales Rally GB got us thinking… what if? What if we supplied the paper, could the sport bring the vision?
It could. In the shape of Rally GB route co-ordinator Andrew Kellitt.
Now, worth noting, while we’ve turned our thinking towards blue skies, we have tethered AK to current World Rally Championship regulations. Sort of.
Take a deep breath and dive in.
Leftfield it might be, but the result is superb. And, surely, a sport-wide talking point.
This theoretical route combines a superb sporting challenge with unrivalled promotional potential and no shortage of old-school appeal. But it’s radical. It’s radical in terms of geography, logistics, funding and anything else we’ve ever seen in the World Rally Championship.
“We’re incredibly fortunate to have a superb relationship with Wales,” says Kellitt. “We’ve been based in Cardiff and Deeside for the last 18 years and in that time we’ve built up a huge following for this rally in that part of the world.
“The first day of this new event would have to be in Wales.
“But, before we get into where the first day is going, we need to decide when it’s going to run. I don’t mean what time of the year, I mean which days of the week?”
This story is about challenging convention. Not for the sake of challenging it, but because every now and then it’s worth asking the questions we haven’t asked for a while. Questions like? Why Friday-saturday-sunday?
WRC Promoter will immediately come back at us with the cast-iron rule that the powerstage has to screen at the same time for every event. It’s the promoter’s big ticket item and shifting the time for that would involve significant compromise among worldwide broadcasters.
But what if the trade-off was better-than-ever promotion elsewhere on the event? That, I’m sure, would get Kellitt and his Rally GB colleagues to the table to talk WRC waivers.
“I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for a long time,” says Kellitt. “It’s the most workable way of taking the rally back to what it used to be, a straight-line route visiting numerous parts of the country.” You heard him right. “The plan comes off the back of watching bike races, the big Tours, which are always held up as the model for running a linear route,” he continues. “I started to think about what we might need and could we make it work? Undoubtedly, it would be more expensive than keeping the rally in one place, but taking it to three very different parts of the UK would open us up to huge swathes of the population and potential funding regions.
“What I have is a working idea in my head which starts from, well, it could start from wherever we wanted it to, within reason. As I mentioned, a day in Wales is a great place to start.
“Immediately, I’ve got to explain the logistics of the idea. There’s no main service park, no central service on this route. We would encourage all of the teams to utilise the long-haul-style of kits, which requires considerably less set-up and dismantle time – that’s vital to the plan.
“I understand a lot of the teams will be up in arms at the prospect of not taking their European hospitality structures and I completely understand that – which is why we would look to provide a similar style of temporary structure which could be used by all teams and event sponsors for hospitality at each of the three major halts.”
Major halt? It’s time to put some meat on the bone, Andrew. This is probably a good time to give us the route overview. How will those three days look?
“Day one’s Wales; day two’s Kielder moving north through the Scottish Borders and day three is the Trossachs and possibly across to Perthshire.
“Every aspect of the event moves from day-today in the same way it does for the Tour de France. When the teams first arrive in Britain, the trucks will stop off somewhere accessible for the Welsh stages. This could still be Deeside, but that makes the first day more complicated than it needs to be. Or it could be somewhere like Telford or Shrewsbury – which would make it really easy to get into Wales for the day.
“You might think those towns are a bit small, but we need to think of this as a satellite base for the teams. An immediate hit for population would be to take a superspecial through Wolverhampton or even Birmingham on the Thursday night. But, once shakedown’s done, the teams are away and taking their kit north. By the time the car goes into the first stage in
Wales, all the teams’ command centre and the rally control is up in Windermere tracking it remotely. The teams don’t need anybody on the ground in Wales, but we would have exactly the same safety organisation in place as ever.
“We’d be looking at around 100 kilometres [62 miles] through Wales – nothing vastly different to what we do now. The cars would be out of the town base early, there’s still a reasonable trek across to the woods, and then go through mid-wales taking in stages like Hafren, Dyfi, the usual places and then on up into north Wales for Penmachno and Clocaenog. By early afternoon Friday, the cars would arrive in the loading zone in Ruthin.
“The cars go onto a series of transporters and set off immediately for Windermere in the Lakes. The crews then get into the sort of tour buses we see the cyclists use on the Tour of Britain. In these buses, they can get some rest, watch their onboard videos from the recce, debrief with engineers, eat and sleep.
“While they’re on their way up the road, the team has already set up the service facility. At around eight in the evening, the cars are unloaded from the transporter on the outskirts of the Lakes and driven into Windermere by the crews.
“The teams are given the usual 45-minute service before bed. Day two starts with Grizedale before heading for Kielder and more of the classics such as Bewshaugh, Wauchope and then north into the Borders and places like Twiglees or Castle O’er.
“Once the cars have been serviced and the crews are away to bed, the teams can break down the service and get ready to ship out to Glasgow first thing the next morning. Again, there’s no service during the day – with the focal point of the promotion coming in Glasgow.
“By mid-afternoon, we’re done with the stages and loading the cars onto the transporter and the crews into their comfortable buses and moving to Glasgow. Early evening, just outside the city, the cars are back on the road and into the centre.
“The final day’s around the beautiful Loch Ard and then, this is what I would really like, across the country to Edinburgh for a finish in the castle.
“Now, this takes me back to the start and one of the early questions of why the need to run a Friday-sunday route? We’re taking this fantastic sport of ours to, potentially, some of Britain’s top five biggest cities and urban areas – so why try to compete with what’s going on at the weekend? Why not go in and really deliver an incredible show in Windermere on a Tuesday night, Glasgow on Wednesday and Edinburgh on Thursday, for example?”
So, there we have it. The bare bones of a revolution. Like it? I do. Don’t get bogged down in the minutiae of, where would the stewards be based or how do we manage the refuels?
I well remember guiding Markku Alen through the centre of Turin and overshooting a junction. I told him we needed to make a u-turn across six lanes of traffic, if it was possible?
“Everything,” the master told me, “is possible.” We made the turn.
Now it’s time to embrace the change. ■