DAVID EVANS
“You have to go to the Mull Rally at least once”
There was me thinking I was pretty hardcore. It was well past 0200hrs when I got to bed on Saturday morning after the opening loop of Mull stages on Friday night. Walking into Rally Control with bleary eyes, I couldn’t help but notice clerk of the course Andy Jardine and his deputy Iain Campbell looked worse than me. “What time did you boys get back to the hotel?”
After a bit of head scratching and chin rubbing, Campbell offered: “I went back to the hotel just before 0700hrs. Quick shower and back to it.”
Jardine’s phone was ringing. His answer would have to wait.
And, don’t forget, Friday was the earlier of the two nights. Saturday night finished even later.
It was around that time my mass enthusiasm for the Mull Rally waned ever so slightly.
Then, the lazy turnover of a 2.5-litre Millington engine caught, fired and filled the Ledaig car park with the most wonderful noise and smell. Full fever was restored.
It’s in those moments of being pretty exhausted that the genuine memories are made. It’s when you’re most receptive to the emotions and, even with the rain coming in sideways from the sea, when you see somebody wrestling a 40-year-old Mini down the road trying to avoid the puddles, it’s just as impressive as seeing Paul Mackinnon’s Ford Fiesta R5 step sideways when it goes off the line, such is the brutality being driven into the sodden Hebridean asphalt.
There’s a temptation to dive into a comparison with last week in Wales, but I won’t do that – my esteemed and brilliant (if slightly noisy) colleague Colin Clark is going to do just that in his column later in the paper (see page 27).
What I would say is book Mull for next year. Hopefully, there’s going to be an awful lot more closed-road rallying coming our way in the future, but this is the original. And the best. And don’t just go up for the rally, stay on for a week or so, then marvel at the lanes down which these absolute gladiators have travelled.
And if you drive just one, then make it the journey from Dervaig south towards Salen, down Glen Aros. This is the place for the big speed. This is where the likes of Calum Duffy have wheeled their Ford Escort Mk2s at 140mph. It’s testament to the suspension advances that cars arriving at the same time as The Dark Side of the Moon can cope with the sort of demands placed on them by competition on this most special of Scottish isles.
Enough about Mull. I only meant to write a couple of paragraphs on last weekend and now this has happened. The other thing I wanted to talk about was Citroen’s radical new aerodynamic approach to the C3 WRC.
Pictures have been hard to come by and the team themselves are remaining tight-lipped on the topic, but it’s certainly going to spice Spain up just that little bit more.
Like the penultimate round of the championship needed any more spice. Next week’s going to be a special one, with Ott Tanak potentially making history as the first ever Estonian to win the world championship. And the first non-frenchman since Petter Solberg 16 years ago.