STAGE FIGHT: GETTING STARTED IN RALLYING
A willingness to help out those with less experience and knowledge are the watchwords to encourage new talent onto the stages, and there are plenty of ways to get involved. Nick Garton explains
Rallying is the friendly face of motorsport. Partly that’s because competitors aren’t going wheel-to-wheel and gnashing teeth at one another but, instead, just trying to beat Old Father Time. But it’s also very much part of the culture of the sport that makes it a bedrock of the activity for grassroots motor clubs up and down the country.
There are numerous entry points to get a first toe on the ladder of rallying. It could be a gift voucher for a driving experience or a burning desire to get on the stages and emulate the likes of Elfyn Evans and
Matt Edwards and reach for the stars as a professional. It could even come from just being an enthusiast, attending the local club and taking part in an autosolo or a production car autotest.
Taking part in events such as these, tackling a laid-out course of cones rather than a bespoke rally stage, can be done in a standard road car without a full competition licence, just your club membership and the free RS Clubman Licence that is available via the Motorsport UK website. These events are the perfect icebreaker to get to know people in the club and gain entry to the wider world of the club’s activities, which could include 12-car events and navigational road rallies.
The clubs are the heartland of the sport but, for most newcomers, the first taste of driving a rally car comes from a rally driving experience, the overwhelming majority of which are operated by full-time rally schools. One of the longest-serving of the breed is the Silverstone Rally School, based across the road from the main entrance of ‘the home of British motor racing’ and which these days is operated by rally perennial Dave Paveley and his driver daughter Jade.
“You can train here, you can test here, you can get your licence stamped here, there’s pretty well everything that you might want to get a first taste of rallying and to go from there to your first rallies as a competitor,” says operations manager Sharon
Ford. “Last year we completed and stamped around 10 BARS [licences] per month.”
A good education remains important to the rally community and John Caine, head man at the Phil Price Rally School in Powys, has one of the busiest forest venues in the country.
“A rally school is usually the first step because you meet guys that compete and to us as a school, we can help them get a licence and try to take them forward. Interest is across the board, male and female, from their teens to their 60s,” he says.
“Most of our intake is experience days, gift vouchers and things like that but there is a small percentage that comes back to do the BARS course and then go off and do some rallying.”
Not only does the school’s pool of instructors bring real-world rally experience for students to learn from, but it also maintains the link as a venue for advanced driver coaching, providing gainful employment to – and valuable lessons from – some of the biggest names in the sport.
“We do a lot with Matt Edwards and David Higgins” says Caine. “They come here and do one-toone with people in their own cars and that’s quite a good step for someone, once they’ve got their licence, to do something like that.
“We can do one-to-one as well on the stage, we’ve got all the stage furniture and help people get used to every aspect of going through a stage.”
An additional facet at some schools, such as the Silverstone operation, is the opportunity to undertake your first rallies with the school. “We get a good turn-around rate from experiences that granny’s bought you to getting the bug and coming back and going right through to rallying,” says Silverstone’s Ford.
“We have a fleet of one-litre Nissan Micras that you can arrive and drive with an instructor co-driving you. We run an academy here doing courses between one and three days for 14-to-17-year olds to look at driving, at nutrition, finding sponsors and the business of rallying to get the youngsters involved.
“But at any age, you can get your BARS, do your training, work on your technique and then go club rallying with us for around £2000 per event.”
If the rallying bug bites hard enough, the temptation is always there to strike out on your own and build or buy a car in which to compete regularly on the stages and, while schools do offer arrive-and-drive, they are also happy to counsel drivers on their next steps.
“The first thing I would tell anyone to do is join a motor club,” says Caine. “If they do a course with us, and maybe an extra-intensive course, then probably a single-venue event is best to start with. It’s a bit racy to go straight into the forest but people have done it.
It’s just quite hard to find an experienced co-driver to go with you straight away.
“The grassroots, like singlevenue and road rallying, is where we need to draw attention to because there is less cost, you can do it as a family, everyone chips in as the service crew and they can watch the car all day as well.”
For potential stars of the future, Formula 1000 is effectively the karting class of rallying in which youngsters from 14 to 17 years of age can compete in a safe and well managed series tailored to their age and experience.
“The thing about getting started
“A gift day can lead to a full rally attack” John Caine
in the sport is that it looks daunting but you meet the right people through clubs and events, you can get a cheap car and go rallying,” says F1000 champion and current BTRDA hotshoe Rob Wilson.
“I got a £2000 car and got a
£200 trailer and went rallying. Rallying is a very accepting place, everyone enjoys the sport and they’re really friendly. It’s a nice place to be.”
One of the kingpins in Formula 1000 is the series technical officer, Gareth Hooper. “Some people build their own cars to keep the costs down although it doesn’t always work out cheaper, but you can get three good years out of them and then they become available.
“The Micras are the cheapest to buy but they’re still reasonably competitive and then you have the Citroen C1-type cars [including the Peugeot 106 and Toyota Aygo], and lately the Skoda Citigos have become very popular [with sister models the Seat Mii and Volkswagen Up!], but it’s largely down to budget,” Hooper explains.
“You can normally pick up a good Micra for £4000-£5000 but if you want a Citigo they’re £15,000-plus. It just depends on your budget, really. As with all motorsport.”
Being a hotbed for young talent and heavily-invested parents can be a cause of friction elsewhere in motorsport, but Hooper is proud of the congenial atmosphere that rallying enjoys.
“In karting – well, the parents can get a bit excitable,” Hooper chuckles. “We don’t seem to get that in junior rallying: they can have a good fight in the cars but outside the cars it’s all mates, really. We’ve had drivers like Rob Wilson and Tommi Meadows who have gone on to bigger things and [M-Sport WRC driver] Gus Greensmith. We’ve about 15 registered at the moment for 2022, that makes a nice championship.”
Teenage whizzkids in one-litre cars are not the only ones who are looking to make a future in the sport, however. At the national finals for the FIA Rally Star competition, the arrival of a lot of gamers brought potential stars from the online world into their first real-world rally experience. Among them was musician, influencer and video producer Axel Grassi-Havnen, who is completely set on getting as far as he can in the sport.
“I discovered rallying through watching videos online,” he says. “Someone forwarded me clips of this insane extreme sport, and I was totally gripped by watching the cars, the skills, and also the environments in which they compete. Being out in nature, experiencing forests and snow and all these different elements whilst driving is what really made rallying just a revelation in my life.”
Grassi-Havnen went and got a BARS, but his approach from then on went off-piste compared to most youngsters. Without the funding needed to go rallying straight off the bat, he decided to put his media skills to work and forge his own way towards the top.
“I saw some videos of Ruairi Bell competing and he came across so brilliantly that I messaged him to ask him for advice – and he replied. To have someone who is working so hard at making his own path take time out and reply and build that relationship is really special, and he’s someone I cannot speak highly enough about: he’s just a lovely person.”
Bell himself took an unorthodox route into the sport, being raised in central London and therefore far from the heartland of Britain’s forests where the majority of the rally community lives and works.
“My dad was a co-driver in Ireland and Europe, so I knew the sport well but, yeah, London is hardly the focal point for the sport. Too many traffic lights round here!” Bell laughs.
After a brief foray into Formula 1000, he elected to go and compete in Spanish junior rallying to build up experience before returning to Britain to compete in the Junior World
Rally Championship and, in
2021, put together a Junior
British championship bid.
“I was slightly amazed that Axel dropped me a note, but it’s been the start of a whole new approach to rallying for us both.”
Grassi-Havnen is now the anchorman for Bell’s prodigious social media output on Instagram and YouTube, shining a light on the sport to a new, young and growing audience. The importance of this aspect is pure gold to potential sponsors, which all young drivers must chase if they are to keep going in the sport.
“There’s a really big pressure to build your social media, keep the momentum,” says BTRDA hotshoe Rob Wilson, who now competes for likes and shares with Bell and other young drivers.
“I know that I’ve got the results in competition, but companies that you approach as sponsors also look at how many Instagram followers you have and how many YouTube videos you put out.
You have to take much more of a marketing approach to agree how you will share your platform in return for the sponsorship.”
For Grassi-Havnen and Bell, their creative partnership on social media may yet lead the aspiring driver towards the drive that he so clearly craves.
“Working with Ruairi is just an incredible pleasure, and he’s been so generous with things like letting me try out his Fiesta R2,” Grassi-Havnen says.
“I’m delivering my best work and using every possible means to build the network that will help to get myself into a car and compete.
“One day I’d love to go up against Ruairi – just think of the content we could get from that! We’re working every day to make sure that his talent is recognised and for me to make a launchpad for my own career, and to be able to compete against each other one day would be the most incredible achievement.”