BTRDA SEASON FACING DELAYED START WITH RALLY CANCELLATIONS
Rallynuts Stages could follow Malcolm Wilson Rally in falling by the wayside
By Luke Barry
The planned opening to the 2021 BTRDA Rally Series season is looking under threat, with the Malcolm Wilson Rally already cancelled and the Rallynuts Stages on the brink of the same fate.
Malcolm Wilson organisers announced that the seasonopening March 13 event wouldn’t be running on its intended date after MN went to press last week. Clerk of the course Kevin Savage subsequently told MN the cancellation was a “done deal” as soon as the national lockdown was confirmed by the UK Government on January 4.
“Now we can’t move with Covid we wouldn’t be able to do recces, we couldn’t get roadbooks and all the rest of it so that was just the final straw really, the lockdown,” Savage said. “It’s never easy cancelling an event, but I think it was a done deal as soon as Boris Johnson locked us down. We didn’t have an option.”
The Malcolm Wilson was already compromised for 2021 before the new strain of coronavirus as the event couldn’t utilise Forestry England land like it normally would due to a suspension of motorsport activity until at least April – a result of a wider review. Savage confirmed to MN the rally would have therefore been a mixed-surface affair with stages in Greystoke forest and RNAD Broughton Moor (a Royal Navy ammunitions dump) had it run, but the organisers have not ruled out rescheduling the event later in the year.
Rallynuts organisers, meanwhile, have also been working on a plan B for the April 17 rally, designing what joint clerk of the course Keith Ashley described as “an expanded single-venue” route to minimise contact with residents and the general public. But those efforts may prove to be in vain too, with an organisers’ meeting being held on January 13 after MN went to press set to decide the rally’s future in 2021.
Speaking before that meeting, Ashley told MN: “The developments of this year so far aren’t making it any easier that’s for sure. We’re effectively waiting for two governments to make decisions and that makes life pretty much outside of your control, all you can do is second guess but the longer it goes, the more difficult it is for us. I don’t wish to be negative, it’s just that we’ve got to be realistic. It’s a game of snakes and ladders: you hope you go up more ladders than you come down snakes.”
If the Rallynuts is cancelled it would, for the time being, leave a potential six-round BTRDA calendar beginning on May 22 with the Plains Rally and concluding on October 30 with the Cambrian Rally.