The European Rally Championship is keen to host a round in the UK, whether that be in 2024 or 2025.
Britain hasn’t had a round of any major international rally championship since 2019 – the last time Wales Rally GB was staged in the World Rally Championship.
The last time the UK featured on the ERC calendar was back in 2016 for the Circuit of Ireland Rally.
But from as early as last year, Wales’ Rali Ceredigion – a Tarmac event based in the coastal town of Aberystwyth – has been linked to the ERC and in a statement last month, the organizer confirmed its ambitions to be a European championship event “sooner rather than later”.
Discussing next year’s calendar with DirtFish, ERC championship manager Iain Campbell made it clear that that feeling is mutual.
“It is our ambition to be in the UK with an ERC round so I’m heading to Ceredigion in a couple weeks’ time to go and see that, and again to go and see the people down there, see the local authorities and see if we can get that deal together,” Campbell said.
“Whether that be for ’24 or ’25 comes down to how these discussions go.”
The announcement of the full 2024 ERC calendar is targeted to be in October in the lead up to the final round in Hungary.
Rally Estonia is expected to replace WRC-bound Latvia, while Poland could become a WRC round too but in that instance appears likely to remain in the ERC too.
It’s currently unclear if Wales’ potential inclusion would boost the calendar to nine rounds or come at the expense of another event, but it’s understood the ERC’s preference is to stick with eight rallies.
Asked about any changes to the 2024 schedule, Campbell said: “There could be some date changes in the traditional locations where events are.
“And yes we’ve got to go and replace Latvia, but we’re also only in our second year of being the promoter of ERC and last year’s calendar was very much what we inherited if you like.
“This year has been a hybrid of taking on the new events, especially with the likes of Royal Rally of Scandinavia, but really the work of introducing new events is not the work of a moment so it takes a bit of time.
“So it’ll be another period before we get the calendar that we want to hold as being our own.
“The approaches that we’re getting for ERC are from events that have actually got the ambition of using ERC because they want to go further,” Campbell added.
“I appreciate Simon [Larkin, WRC event director] has the world to play with but Europe is still a fairly big territory, and we want to go and try and spread that around.
“We have a lot of support from eastern European competitors and broadcasters, but we want to try and move more into some of the western areas because this is very specific to one area at the moment.
“It’s looking for the ambitious events that want to grow that we go after.”
