WHY THE BRITS ADORE BELGIUM STAGES
Rally stars look to continental challenge
There’s a real sense of irony to this feature that MN wrote before the news broke that Ypres would be joining the World Rally Championship in place of the UK’s round. Why? Because British rallying has actually long been a fan of Belgian rallying.
In 2017, the British Rally
Championship organisers elected to include the Ypres Rally on their schedule while Asphalt Championship bosses followed suit a year later inducting Rally van Wervik into theirs.
However it’s fair to say this wasn’t a move that thrilled the pedants among us: a Belgian rally in a British championship. Whether you agree with that viewpoint or not, there’s no denying it was a bold decision to take a national series to an entirely different nation. British drivers heading to Ypres for example as part of a wider programme is nothing new – particularly in the 1990s with drivers like Mark Higgins – but a points-paying British round held on Belgian soil had never been seen before.
Nevertheless, following discussions midway through the 2016 Nicky Grist Stages, BRC championship manager Iain Campbell tells MN that a rally of Ypres’ stature with an electric atmosphere and “razzmatazz” was what the competitors wanted, and “we didn’t have something to offer in the UK from that point of view”.
Campbell, therefore, made a phone call to Alain Penasse – the president of the Ypres organising club as well as Hyundai’s WRC team manager – to ask his thoughts on taking the BRC to a different event in Belgium, to which Penasse immediately suggested: ‘why don’t you come to Ypres?’A quick visit was then arranged and a deal to bring the BRC to Belgium was agreed.
“Ypres has a huge reputation,” Campbell tells Motorsport News. “When we went there in 2017 there was a whole lot of panic from us and from the competitors because of the unknown; the regulations are very detailed and there was a lot of worry about how these things would go but it actually went so smoothly it was unbelievable. And the welcome we’ve always had has been phenomenal. Everybody that went loved it.”
The very same Ford Fiesta R5 (chassis 200, PX66 DZT) has taken maximum championship points from Ypres en route to that year’s British title. Keith Cronin bossed the Flanders fields in 2017 before Matt Edwards took the spoils in 2018 and ’19 in spite of car trouble on both occasions. Edwards tells MN Ypres is one of his favourites.
He says: “I think the sense of the occasion is unrivalled to anything else the BRC does. That’s not to detract from the organisers of the [other] BRC events, it’s more the general public that make that event, just the general popularity over there makes it a great sense of occasion. The challenge of going somewhere else with a great strength in depth of the entry as well just makes for a really good all-round event.”
It’s a similar story for Rally van Wervik in the Asphalt series too. Champion of the last two years Jason Pritchard has had no luck in Belgium – starting four events in his career and failing to finish any of them – but has unrivalled enthusiasm for the culture and the style of the events.
“I’m never going to refuse to go to Belgium,” he says. “Part of doing a rally is not just the rally it’s the adventure, the bit behind it all as well: going to the event, the atmosphere, the trip of it, it’s not just on the stages it’s everything so going to Belgium is one we all enjoy. We go Ypres to watch it every year [let alone compete]. Everyone makes you feel welcome there, it’s a good atmosphere, it’s sociable. It’s what we go rallying for.”
The nature of the stages are another big draw too. Traditionally relatively flat with deep cuts, “it’s a different challenge,” according to Pritchard: “You’ve got the cuts, it’s a challenge and you want challenges in life.”
That challenge can be both a blessing or a hindrance though. For Tom Cave, who fought Edwards for the 2019 British title, it’s proved to be the latter.
He admits he’s always found the event tricky and says it has never flowed for him. That means he’s aware it’s always potentially going to be anAchilles’heel for him. He says: “The locals in Belgium, they know it like the back of their hand. They know where to cut, they know where not to cut and that’s the key because if you cut a little bit too deep you get these culverts that are coming out onto the side of the road and if you clip one of them, at best you’re going to rip a wheel off or worst you’re going to end up having a big accident.
“I wasn’t comfortable going into that event from the outset [in 2019], even from the [pre-event] test I didn’t feel comfortable in the carI didn’t make it public to people then. It was quite evident on the free practice when I ended up going off, it’s because I just didn’t know where the limit of the car was on those roads. It was either 11 tenths or eight tenths, it wasn’t in the middle. I was always over the limit or I wasn’t going hard enough. It’s a tricky old place, Belgium.”
Subjective adaptation to the stages aside, there are other drawbacks to heading to Belgium as part of a championship, notwithstanding the ease of travel there (pre-Brexit, at least) as Pritchard points out. “For those in the south of England it’s easier for them to get there than to Epynt or something like that,” he says.
It may be easier for some to get to, but it’s also a lot heavier on the wallet. So in amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the presently unknown variable of Brexit, it’s perhaps not hard to see why – despite the clear enthusiasm for the events – both Ypres and Rally van Wervik have been dropped from their respective British calendars. Cave says: “It is a very expensive rally, I can honestly say that to you. I won’t give you a figure but it was certainly the most expensive on the calendar by 20-30%. We’ve already done a budget [for this year] and it does work out around 20% cheaper than it was compared to 2019 so from that respect I think it’s the right decision not having it on the calendar.”
There’s more to it than expense, though. Wervik’s absence from the Asphalt schedule was confirmed before coronavirus as more closed-road events in the UK arose so the absence looks to be for the longer-term, but a BRC return to Ypres hasn’t been ruled out by Campbell.
“Put it this way, I would love to go back,” says Campbell before confirming cost and Brexit were factors in the event being dropped from the 2021 calendar. “But the biggest factor was the unknown impact of Covid on what UK rallying will look like in 2021. It’s for exactly the same reason we’re not going to West Cork. They’re two big events which are generally a week so maybe five days, but realistically it’s seven days and that’s going to be the issue.”
Don’t be surprised then to see Ypres back on the British Rally Championship calendar in the future, just perhaps not the near future. The elephant in the room now is whether Ypres disloading GB from the 2021 WRC calendar will spoil all of this goodwill...