When McRae finally conquered the rally that eluded him

The monkey was off his back. The duck broken. But a nation still expected. And 30 years ago today, Colin McRae delivered a home win nobody would forget.

A 17-year wait for a British World Rally Championship event win was done in New Zealand, 1993. A few months on from that southern hemisphere success, it looked like the Scot would eclipse Roger Clark’s RAC Rally win of 1976. For the third year in succession he led, but England’s far north did for him.

So, to 1994.

This time, nobody came close. The then 26-year-old Subaru driver looked to be in a different place. That weight of expectation remained huge, but McRae had found a way to treat the RAC like any other rally. That was the key.

On a typically wet RAC, McRae, Derek Ringer, their Impreza 555 and its Pirelli tires were untouchable. Ford drivers François Delecour and Miki Biasion searched in vain for traction, while the man who’d won two of Britain’s previous three WRC rounds Juha Kankkunen simply couldn’t get his Celica Turbo 4WD dialled. The Finn’s Toyota team-mate Didier Auriol was nowhere, but ironically he was the only driver who could cost McRae victory.

Battling Carlos Sainz for the 1994 world title, Auriol would need to rely on the Japanese team slowing Kankkunen down to deliver the requisite points for a maiden French world drivers’ title. Subaru could still counter that trick… by slowing McRae down and elevating Sainz from second to first.

Giving best to Sainz for the first two stages of a Sunday tour around the stately homes and race tracks of the English midlands, McRae hit the front on SS3 and controlled proceedings from there.

What of the north? The Lakes, Grizedale, Kielder, places where his hopes and dreams had been shattered in 1991, ’92 and ’93? No problem this time. McRae’s only gripe was the long haul back down the M6 towards two days in Wales. He suggested his own solution to the big trip south, wondering whether he could get Sainz to tow him and do the driving for both of them.

McRae was on form. Doing precisely what he had to do: dominate the rally the from the front. He batted off question after question about the clouds which looked to be gathering towards the finish in Chester.

Subaru team principal David Richards wasn’t quite so restrained in his consideration of Toyota’s impending and obvious team orders.

“All they can do is cost Colin victory,” he rightly reasoned, apparently holding all the cards for what would be a maiden drivers’ title for Subaru.

Sadly, there would be an unpleasant twist on the final morning, when ‘fans’ appeared to take matters into their own hands by placing logs in the middle of the road in the Pantperthog stage as Sainz came through. The Spaniard avoided them, but went off on the following Dyfi stage.

Looking back on that RAC years later, Sainz is more phlegmatic – but still felt there could have been more support.

“It was a difficult event,” he told DirtFish. “I think the team could have done more [for me], but it was like it was more important for Colin to win his home event. I never had the team tell me: ‘It’s OK, Colin will support you.’ We were trying to win the first world championship for Subaru.”

And the mistake in Dyfi? Was it a matter of concentration?

“Luis [Moya, co-driver] was a little bit late with the note,” he said. “It was not a good event. It was quite sad.”

As Sainz stood roadside in Dyfi, Auriol landed a world title which had looked lost for much of the last four days. And McRae re-wrote British rally history. Chester, it’s fair to say, was chuffed and very much in the mood for a party.

For double world champion Biasion, the 1994 RAC was the end of the road as the Italian signed off on his professional career. It wasn’t quite the glittering end he would have hoped for: a failed engine on the second Grizedale stage silenced his Ford and left him standing in the dark searching an early flight home.

For Colin, it was just the beginning.

“This time next year,” he told an adoring crowd at the city’s racecourse finish, “I want to come back here fighting for the title.”

And that’s exactly what he did.