A day spent with the McRae family is never going to be a day wasted. The one I spent with Jimmy, Alister and Max in Wales last September certainly wasn’t.
As well as watching three generations of world rallying’s biggest name enjoying cars from son, brother and uncle Colin’s career, I met Steve.
Steve is Steve Rimmer. He’s the man responsible for that day, those cars and – a few months down the line – this website.
The vision Steve and the rest of the team share for DirtFish is unbelievably exciting. It was going to take something this big to get me off the pages I’ve loved my entire working life and into a corner of cyberspace that is and forever will be all about rallying.
I’ll continue to cover the World Rally Championship in the same depth I have for the last 20 years with Autosport and Motorsport News. But there’s going to be more than words. There’s going to be podcasts, videos, galleries and – so it says here – a much bigger effort at social media from me.
I’ll try, I promise.
The features we’ve got in the pipeline are genuinely some of the most innovative and exciting I’ve ever dreamed ofDavid Evans
In all honesty, I’ve never been the best at writing about myself and extolling the virtues of what I do. To be honest, this whole column introducing myself was, to my mind, a little bit unnecessary. I could have used this space to talk about the time I crashed a Volkswagen Race Touareg into a lake. Or when Spanish fans tried to get onto the bonnet of the car Carlos Sainz and I were sharing. I could even tell you about nearly beating Chris Atkinson in a Porsche 911.
But I’m told it’s more important to tell you what I’ll be doing; what you’ll find in this space from today forwards. Well, actually, it’s going to more of the above. Hopefully with fewer lakes.
The immediate focus is on expanding DirtFish.com’s rally coverage. We saw a big step at the Monte Carlo Rally last month and those big steps will just keep getting bigger and bigger as the season unfolds.
And I really can’t wait.
The features we’ve got in the pipeline are genuinely some of the most innovative and exciting I’ve ever dreamed of. This is an opportunity for DirtFish to dig deeper and tell stories we never thought we’d get to tell.
The only downside to all this good stuff? The team kit. My fabulous colleagues from Seattle, and Mr Colin Clark himself, are all svelte-looking ladies and gents well suited to those clingy-lycra-like jumpers. Me? Less so. I don’t think you can go far wrong with lambswool.
Let’s see how the jumper thing plays out.
In the meantime, welcome to my very, very exciting new world.
