VOLKSWAGEN’S HISTORY IN BRITISH RALLYING
How the German firm got the bug for UK competition
Fighting back from a puncture picked up on the previous stage, reigning British Rally champion Tapio Laukkanen was on a high-speed push in his Volkswagen Golf IV Kit Car over one of the Manx’s notorious bumps, got crossed up and rolled out of the contest.
It was a sore end to a bruising 2000 campaign, but little did we know it would be the last time Volkswagen would fight at the front of the British
Rally Championship.
Two decades later, the book is about to be reopened as British champion Matt Edwards will bring the brand back to the BRC on next month’s Neil Howard Stages as he looks to write a new chapter history with a Polo GTI R5.
“I wouldn’t have changed if I didn’t feel confident I could do it,” Edwards, who has traded an M-Sport Ford Fiesta for the VW, says of his title aspirations. “It’s good to be bringing another brand back even if the long-term future of the brand in the R5 category isn’t necessarily going to be forever.”
VW’s rallying journey in the UK began in 1983 when Kalle Grundel powered a Golf GTI to a stunning eighth overall on the RAC Rally but ramped up three years later with the Volkswagen Junior Rally Driver Team.
Four youngsters from each of the home nations – Simon Davison (England), Steve Davies (Wales), Robin Phillips (Northern Ireland) and Callum Guy (Scotland) – were handed works drives in the BRC with the eventual winner, Davison, taking advantage of a prize drive on the 1986 RAC.
But it’s the bright yellow, Sony-backed Golf III Kit Car that’s perhaps the most iconic VW that graced these shores.
Run by SBG Sport – a collaboration between Steve Black and Norman Gault – the team first ran Jimmy McRae on the 1993 RAC before competing in the British championship until 1998 against works teams from Nissan,
Ford, Seat, Renault and Vauxhall.
Black tells MN: “We got involved because Norman and I both worked for David Sutton – who rather poignantly and very sadly passed away last week – in 1986 when VW launched their Junior Team and so we had links to VW and to Shell UK with whom we ran a scholarship programme. VW were not involved in the day-to-day running of the programme because it was part-funded. VW let us make proposals to their suppliers and so we managed to persuade Sony to back us. They weren’t that interested in us, but the VW contract was a big part of their UK business.”
The first driver to complete a full season in an SBG VW was Sebastian Lindholm with a Group A Golf before fellow Finn Tapio Laukkanen and Dom Buckley Jr pedalled the cars in ’95. There was an allFinnish line-up for ’96 as Jouko Puhakka joined Laukkanen in the main squad with Ashley Blenkhorn also competing before Alister McRae was persuaded by VW team manager Steve Bagnall to join for the Ulster and RAC Rallies.
McRae says: “At the end of ’95 we’d won the British championship with Nissan. I turned down an offer to continue with Nissan in the hope that we were going to manage to break into WRC with Ford and it didn’t happen. So, at the start of ’96 I didn’t have a programme, and then Steve Bagnall approached me to see if I’d be interested in doing a few events in the VW that year.”
Mechanical trouble would rob McRae of a finish in ’96, but the 1997 season was where the focus was with the brand-new Golf III Kit Car, built to F2 regulations. McRae won on its BRC debut on the Rally of Wales and doubled up on his home event, the RSAC Scottish Rally, on what was an historic result with Laukkanen tucked behind in second.
“It was the best gravel car,” Black says of the Golf. “The Lehman engine was very driveable low-down, but we had the least power compared to the competition. The diff and the dampers were developed by our engineer David Potter so we had tremendous traction. On Tarmac we were never a match for Renault and
Ford, though, once they bought along the wide-arched Escort.”
It wasn’t pace but mechanical drama that would peg McRae back on the Ulster though as a driveshaft broke at the start of the second day, restricting him to fifth in the points. But the Scot still lead into the final round where the famous fiveway Manx showdown between McRae, Ford’s Gwyndaf Evans, Renault’s Robbie Head and Martin Rowe and Nissan’s Mark Higgins took place.
“The event started poorly,” Black remembers. “Alister had handbrake issues, the windscreen misted up when the rain came, and the steering was struggling through the chicanes.
Day two started and we went in the management car to watch mid-stage and we realised quite quickly that Gwyndaf had crashed so our plan was to get to the finish and explain the situation to Alister. We waited and waited and then the news came through that he had stopped...”
McRae had crashed out spectacularly from fifth place, ejecting himself from the title equation. But Volkswagen was still in the frame for manufacturers’ honours, and the team had brought along reinforcements in the form of
Neil Simpson to help seal the deal.
Simpson tells MN: “I had a huge admiration for Steve Bagnall, and I thought while he was a ‘Marmite’ character – people were frightened of him; he called a spade a spade – I always found him to be fair, I liked his strategy and I liked the way the car was going. I used to go and see him every year in silly season, knock on his office door and beg him to give me a drive. He used to say ‘you’re too skinny and you’re not fast enough, come back next year’.”
But when Volkswagen needed a third driver at short notice, Simpson got the nod. There were limitations though. He had signed a contract with Bagnall that dictated that if Simpson broke the Golf’s engine, he’d have to pay the £50,000 replacement cost. But when McRae crashed, Simpson’s entry suddenly became vital to the manufacturers’ title for VW.
“They needed me to get a result,” Simpson says. “Me and Bagnall had a meeting in the motorhome, and he tore up the engine contract and said ‘you better get this car into the top five!’”
Simpson finished sixth and, with Laukkanen in third, the title was
VW’s – its only success in the BRC. Simpson was invited to VW HQ in Hanover as a thank you but what he was offered for the following season didn’t meet his expectations. Simpson wouldn’t be driving a Golf Kit Car but a diesel TDI instead.
“I was just thinking ‘this is going to be a laughing stock’. I drove the car and thought it felt fast but very different because it didn’t make the noise the
Kit Car made.
“In a Kit Car if you go a bit wide on a corner, you’re down the box and you’re on the throttle and pulling the car out of the problem. With the TDI you changed up,” Simpson adds. “So it was a mental challenge when you’re heading for the undergrowth to get off the brakes, change up and press the throttle because it was the torque that pulled you out of the problem. Training yourself to behave in a way that’s completely counter-intuitive is a massive challenge.”
But despite those reservations, Simpson soon warmed to the car and it culminated in second overall on the 1999 Manx. “I thoroughly enjoyed it: it was just a great rally,” he recalls. “There were people hanging out the hedges cheering you on because it was so different.
“In the service area you couldn’t get near us, there was just absolute frenzy around the whole thing it was fantastic. And it was quick. I was told by [chief engineer] Karl Heinz Goldstein ‘don’t go off the feeling, go off the clock’and that was absolutely it.”
The petrol Golfs were still performing handsomely too. McRae was the focal
“The Golf III Kit Car was the best on gravel’” Steve Black
point of SBG Sport and the Golf
III’s final year in ’98 as he started several World events including a win on Rally Finland against natives such as Toni Gardemeister.
“People said ‘you’ll not do it,’” recalls McRae. “So for me, to go to Finland with SBG, a small team out of the UK, and beat the Finns in their own backyard: that’s one of the stand-out moments with the Volkswagen.”
Things changed in 1999. McRae moved to Hyundai in the WRC, Laukkanen had already replaced Head at Renault the previous year and VW Motorsport took over its UK rallying entry. SBG Sport’s time with the programme was over, and a brand-new car was developed: the Golf IV Kit Car. The man entrusted to drive it was Mark Higgins alongside VW’s test driver Raimund Baumschlager.
“The car got better,” Higgins tells MN. “At the end of the year we won the F2 World championship round on the RAC with the car, so things were coming good towards the end of the year, but we just didn’t get on top of it until too late. I knew straight away that it wasn’t a Nissan Sunny when I drove it for the first time but they developed it. This car was very much a German car as opposed to what they’d had before with Alister when it had been done by SBG.”
It wouldn’t be a vintage year for Higgins who managed just two podiums all year to finish sixth in the standings before being lured away by a more attractive offer from Vauxhall. “We’d made it [the Golf] the best we could but then when I got in the Astra there was quite a difference,” Higgins admits. “I never felt comfortable but, on the other hand, it was a great year. I enjoyed the team and working with Steve.”
The year 2000 would be VW’s last in the BRC’s premier class as the Formula 2 rules fizzled out. Laukkanen returned to drive in a one-car team but there’d be no final hurrah for VW – the titles going to Vauxhall and privateer Marko Ipatti.
The brand remained in British rallying at lower levels thereafter, running a Polo S1600 for new VW test driver Simpson and then David Higgins in the makeshift Formula Rally before operating a onemake series for Group N Polos in the early 2000s.
But a VW has never won a BRC round since Laukannen’s sole victory of 2000 on the Scottish Rally. Just 11 days shy of 21 years afterwards, Edwards will be gunning to put that right. With his and Volkswagen’s BRC pedigree, few will be betting against it.