To me Gwyndaf Evans has always been a Seat man.
That has an awful lot to do with B-7501-TK – the Seat Ibiza Kit Car chassis he drove to second place in the 1999 British Rally Championship, so spectacularly immortalized by the Rally Championship computer game developed by Magnetic Fields.
If you want an amazing retro rally soundtrack by the way, look that up on the internet! And somebody send me a disc for that game too, please. Life was just better when my biggest worry was which A7 car I was going to attack Clocaenog Mid with.
We’ve taken a diversion there, apologies! The point I was trying to make is that Elfyn Evans’ father is best remembered for his period in yellow for me. But in reality, most of you reading probably associate him most with the blue oval of Ford.
After all, it was in an Escort RS2000 that Gwyndaf claimed his (somehow) only British title in 1996, and he made the odd World Rally Championship appearance for Ford too – namely Rally Indonesia that same year.
But before that Gwyndaf was a Sierra man – driving an RS Cosworth as well as Group N version in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
But did you know that Gwyndaf’s overseas WRC debut was also in a Sierra, all the way back in 1990?
I didn’t, but thanks to the Girardo & Co. Archive, now I do! And I therefore had to pick a photo from this era of our ‘picture of the week’ this time around.
The picture in question comes from Rally Sweden 1991 – Gwyndaf’s third overseas WRC event in a Q8 Team Ford car.
It wasn’t, sadly, the most successful of outings. Although the Welshman was initially hovering around the top 10, he would roll on stage eight and retired for good early on leg two with accident damage.
His son Elfyn would fare a lot better in 2020 when he swept all before him and became the first British driver ever to win Rally Sweden.
There are relevancy points here, too! There’s no compulsion for our ‘picture of the week’ feature to have any ties to today, but it never harms if it does.
And that connection? I was at the Ulster Rally at the weekend, which Gwyndaf Evans won twice in the past. And I saw a Q8 fuel station when I was over there…
Sometimes the tenuous links are the best ones!
