Welcome home Spain. We’ve missed you. The World Rally Championship is finally back in Carlos Sainz’s backyard.
Sort of. Honestly speaking, not even King Carlos’ backyard extends this far into the Atlantic. But this is still Spain – even though Africa’s only over there and America’s east coast could probably be spotted with a decent set of binoculars.
I’ve only been to this event once before and my lasting memory was of genuine circuit-like stages with fairly consistent asphalt, decent grip (in the dry) and a proper race. That was back in the day when Robert Kubica was doing the European Rally Championship.
I talked to Kubica about the roads and how much more straightforward this event would be for him. He just stared at me.
“Circuit?” he said. “You think this is like the circuit?”
Sensing the interview might be going south, I doubled down and threw in some technical stuff on lines, apexes and exits.
He started laughing.
Robert Kubica would go on to lead – and then crash out of – his one and only outing on Gran Canaria
“People say the same thing for Catalunya,” he said. “They look to the surface and say: ‘Oh yes, it looks like a racetrack.’ It’s not the same at all. On the circuit the corners are never really changing for lap after lap and here in the rally, the grip can change a little bit all the time.”
Apart from that, the interview went really well. Kubica is, of course, a Formula 1 race winner and precision is literally everything. The stage is the stage, the track is the track.
Anyway, I still think the roads are quite circuity.
So did Carlos. And he loved them. The two-time world champion is a five-time winner in Spain’s ninth biggest city (that’s Las Palmas, by the way).
Sainz told DirtFish: “I have good memories from this place. It’s a nice place with some very good roads, they are challenging. I am really happy to see Canarias going to the world championship. It’s very good news to host a WRC round there.
“People will be surprised at the number of fans supporting rallying out there. I know this very well, myself. In my old days, I won El Corte Inglés Rally five times and this is the place, as a Spanish driver, where you are getting the most support.”
Sainz’s fellow rally driver and ERC manager Iain Campbell agreed with the current star of Ford’s Dakar program.
“The support for rallying in the Canaries is absolutely crazy,” said Campbell, a man just two world titles short of Sainz.
“The stages are fantastic. They’re so twisty, the cars will just about turn themselves into their own exhaust pipe! But the fans, the passion the fans bring is on another level. It’s just incredible. It will be a sight to behold when the WRC gets to the Canary Islands.”
I’m looking forward to this week. There’s always a genuine sense of adventure with a new WRC round. Granted a good few of the front runners have been on the island and competed, but not with a Rally1 car and not as a full world championship round.
And, I’ll confess, I’m something of a seasoned Canary Islander, if that’s a thing. As well as that sole ERC outing, this was the first place I holidayed without my parents. My sister and I were packed onto an Air Europe flight to meet Spanish friends of the family who had a holiday home on Gran Canaria.
This was the first place I ever tasted 7UP. And Skittles. I also remember being slightly miffed that my sister was getting a better suntan than me, so I took a big approach to the final day, skipped the suncream and went home with a pair of very well-cooked shoulders.
Before we went home, there was time to the neighboring island of Tenerife. If you find yourself mid-Atlantic for round four, the boat ride across is entirely worthwhile – mainly for Mount Teidi. It’s Spain’s highest mountain (which is actually a volcano) towering over the islands with a sometimes snowy and sometimes smoking peak of more than 12,000 feet.
Best of all, almost year-around, you need a jumper when you get to the top.
