From the front line to cutting lines: How WRC adds to Ypres

The congregation of Ypres’ Sint-Jacobskerk church should be aware that Sunday morning has moved. Plans for worship have changed. Unless, that is, the good people have come to worship the World Rally Championship.

Everybody knows the WRC has landed in Belgium’s north-west this week. What some don’t know is that the production of live television for the nation’s maiden appearance at rallying’s highest level will come from… church.

With a shortage of workable space in such a compact town centre base, Sint Jacobskerk has been pressed into action as the base for WRC TV.

Rally manager and president of the Superstage (the Ypres Rally promoter) Alain Penasse talked to his team of officials in the church ahead of the stage set-up process last week. Penasse looked as comfortable in the pulpit as his people looked in the pews.

The church’s willingness to provide its place of worship in the hands of Ypres Rally is a mark of how much the event means to the town. And it really does.

“We have confiscated everything in Ypres,” smiled Penasse. “Even God is looking to work with us – we are grateful to the people from the church moving their service to another place for the week.”

I might not, in the past, have been the biggest fan of the rally. I’d been a few times, spectated in the middle of a few fields (probably the wrong fields) and been less than inspired by what I saw as a series of straights and 90s.

I was wrong. But it wasn’t until I joined Kevin Abbring in a Hyundai i20 R5 at a pre-event test that I realised how wrong I was.

Like always, I’d built myself a mental picture of where the car would be going as we approached the first corner. I wasn’t even close. That first corner was a long left hander around the front of somebody’s house. Coming into the bend, we dropped from fourth to third and just as I was expecting ratio two to be selected, my Dutch friend turned us in on a trailing throttle.

What on earth?

Between the road and the house, there was stretch of grass and a garden fence. Abbring saw the stretch of grass as part of the road, popped us up onto the bank and pinned the wing-mirror on his side to the garden fence.

Still in third, he was back on the gas. We dropped back onto the road at the corner’s exit, carrying way more speed than I’d ever imagined. It was impossible to turn around and look, but I could only imagine the mess we’d made as we ploughed that poor family’s grass verge.

And so it continued. Yes, there were lots of junctions and square corners, but there were also plenty of medium-speed corners where I can’t wait to watch the current crop of World Rally Cars in action.

With downforce working its magic, those medium-speed corners will mark the difference between the fully committed and those still configuring their brain in the ways of Belgian rallying.

It’s going to be immense.

Admittedly, I’d like it to be a bit wetter. Capricious conditions always bring drama. But talking to those in the know – like the King of Ypres, 11-time winner Freddy Loix – there’s plenty of scope for drama, even in the baking sunshine this country has waited long enough for.

You’d have to have been living on another planet not to have noticed the floods which have hit Belgium and neighbouring countries. Such genuine human tragedy gives context to sport and what we’ll be doing this week.

But Ypres really isn’t a place short of context. This town stood in the way of Germany’s plans to sweep through Belgium and France during the First World War and stood against the invading forces longer than any other town in Belgium.

The town came under intense fire between 1914 and 1918, with the Grote Markt all-but levelled.

All-but.

Look through pictures of the town’s history and you’ll see pictures of destruction, but parts of the great Cloth Hall can still be identified. Today, the town stands proud and rightly refuses to shy away from the part it played in history.

Eight o’clock every evening, the Last Post is played under the arch of the Menin Gate. This memorial to those soldiers killed and left without a grave stands above a road heading east from Ypres and directly to the front line.

Every evening a bugler provides haunting notes to remind us of the world beyond the WRC. And the sacrifice millions made to provide the liberties we all enjoy today.

I make no apology for getting a little more serious than usual.

Ypres is a place full of emotion and the WRC’s arrival will bring world-class automotive sporting competition to the Westhoek roads for the first time.

But Penasse and his disciples aren’t satisfied with that – they’re taking the show south to Spa, too. You can catch the debate between the DirtFish team on whether or not Sunday’s 180-mile road trip to Francorchamps makes sense or not.

To me, it does. It totally does. Much as I’m excited to see Sébastien Ogier and company coming across the Kemmelberg as the sun dips on Friday evening, it’ll be the same on Sunday when we’re in and around some of motorsport most famous corners, like Radillion or Blanchimont.

We’re breaking new ground here. And I can’t wait.