For an event to happen, a dedicated team needs to be behind it. But before that, there must be an idea.
An idea not to give up. An idea to deliver the UK its first World Rally Championship event in eight years.
That idea came courtesy of Motorsport UK commercial and events director, Colin Clark.
With Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship and Formula E all hosting events in the UK, rallying was the world championship that was missing. And Clark, formerly of Prodrive, refused to let that continue.
Last weekend’s Grampian Forest Rally – a round of both the British and Scottish Rally Championships – was the moment the dedication became reality.
Rally Scotland has an agreement for WRC inclusion from 2027, but only if the FIA was satisfied. Last week, several key figures were there to assess the event’s credentials.
“Things are progressing pretty well,” Clark reflected. “We’re building a team. We’ve got a lot of latent and knowledge. We’ve got a lot of the old team that we’re bringing back into play.
“There’s a lot of pent-up demand – lots of people really want to get involved and lots of people are backing the event and that’s just great to see. But this is part of the process to get the FIA along and have them observe it.
“Sure, we’ll find out in a few weeks what the sentiment is.”
Indications are that Rally Scotland’s candidate event was a success, with the FIA particularly impressed with the P&J Live service park just outside Aberdeen Airport.
The visiting drivers – including WRC leader Elfyn Evans and Rally1 colleague Jon Armstrong – were also pleased by the stages, feeling they offered a unique challenge with their high speed, long corners and technical sections.
And perhaps most importantly, fan interest was high. Members of this author’s family don’t usually travel for rallies but came to this one, purely because of the WRC hype. The number of people who flocked to Banchory on Friday evening for the rally zone proved I wasn’t an isolated case.
“Within the motorsport community there’s so much pent-up demand,” Clark reiterated. “Everybody’s been desperate to get a round of the World Rally Championship again. It means so much.
“It used to be an iconic event in the UK. The first year the UK was in the World Rally Championship was 1973, the inaugural year of the championship. And like Finland, we were one of two events that was there year after year. Unfortunately, after COVID, that fell away. But there’s such a pent-up demand from the UK fans for rallying.
“They’ve grown up with all these iconic names: Elfyn Evans winning in 2017, Richard Burns [the world championship in] 2001, Colin McRae in 1995 having been through the British Rally Championship.
“So on one hand we’ve got all that pent-up demand from the motorsport community and the rally community in the UK, and that’s evident from all the sentiment on social media, and then on the other you’ve got all the locals in Aberdeen that just think this is fantastic that this world championship event is going to be coming to Aberdeen and calling Aberdeen its home for the next few years.
Scotland has a strong motorsport heritage, but has never solely held a WRC event before
“They’ve seen the power of what it means to get major events up hereand what it does for galvanising their community, making all the Aberdonians and the peoplefrom Aberdeenshire feel so proud of their community and what they can deliver on a global stage.So I think there’s a couple of different things there for different audiences.”
The local aspect is undoubtedly important, but you and I are part of the first group. We’re rallying people.
Some will yearn for Wales, others would have hoped for Ireland, I personally am very happy with the new location given my nation’s flag is blue and white – but it doesn’t matter.
The fact is the UK has a round of the WRC back, and we owe a lot to thanks to Clark for that.
“It is a team effort,” he explained. “I look after all the major events atMotorsport UK, and of course David Richards is our chairman – who I have worked withan awful long time since my formative years at Prodrive and did six laps of the world withthe Subaru team and were very successful during that time.
“So rallying’s in my heart, and then the opportunity as part of my role to get the round of the World Rally Championship back means an enormous amount. I’m also a proud Scot as well, so that’s terrific in its own right. But notwithstanding that, it is a very difficult business case to get a fine balance to get a round the World Rally Championship, because you require to persuade local authorities and governments in order to invest, because they can see the power of your vision around the event.
“We put together what I’d like to think was quite a compelling feasibility study for the event. We spoke about the heritage of Scottish champions, spoke about this being the homeland of the sport in the hearts of many rally fans – some of the iconic names of motorsports, not just in rallying.
In Scotland, we've got a whole new land of opportunity, and you've seen it for your own eyesColin Clark
“Then it was about using big strategic assets that are up here and making the most of them. I was delighted that we were able to get that across the line and convince other people. Because in my head, as I said on a blank bit of paper, this works as an event.
“Malcolm Wilson came up for the launch event and he said a number of times that this has got the potential to be one of the best rounds of the championship. I like to think he know what he is talking about. We’ve obviously done a really good job persuading him.
“Rich Millener has been up and he provides some fantastic feedback. Everybody’s been super generous with their time, their energy, their ideas, their passion. It has just galvanised so many different communities to get behind the event and make it all happen.
“We did manage to persuade those that were going to be helping us out with the funding to make it happen. That was a great effort. We’re delighted to get the result that we did.”
Clark and his team never gave up on making this happen, even when that was the far easier – and maybe even most realistic – option.
“We looked at various parts of the UK,” Clark continued. “We worked very closely with Bobby Willis in Northern Ireland. It was a deep sense of frustration that that didn’t come to pass, because Bobby workedtirelessly.
“The reality was that there was no one sitting at Stormont, which made it all the more difficult. Regardless of who you can persuade that it’s a great idea, if there’s nobody signing off thecheques, it makes it all the more difficult.
“In England, it’s quite difficult for sports such as ours to get central government funding. But for major events, it has devolved to the devolved nations. We’d been in Wales for a number of years, and I think the event probably needed a bit of a reset. We tried out so many various iterations in Wales over the years, from being in the south to being in the north.
Evans was one of a handful of WRC stars to get an early sample of what Scotland had to offer
“But in Scotland, we’ve got a whole new land of opportunity, and you’ve seen it for your own eyes. Boy, there’s loads of opportunity up here. You look at Aberdeen, there’s a lot of newspaper stories currently about the energy sector and the oil fields and all the rest of it. Notwithstanding that, Aberdeen’s got one of the best GDPs of anycity in the UK.
“Aberdeen’s been there for a long period of time. It’s still a thriving city. There’s the local authorities investing heavily in the city and the infrastructure around the city. They can see the power of major events to deliver locally and make the local communities super proud, and attract new audiences to see the beauty of this bit of the world, because it is a beautiful part of the world.
“Certainly, all those other events are so great, and the arena is great, and the city is very close, and we’ve got great hotels and the airport and all the rest of it. So far so good, it’s just all coming together.”
While no date has been confirmed yet, Motorsport UK is planning “Autumn next year, a historical UK round WRC date”. The next phase of the plan once FIA approval arrives is to focus on the marketing of the event.
Clark has some interesting ideas there, too, having already met the new owners of WRC Promoter at Rally Portugal.
“We had some good meetings in Porto earlier this year in Portugal, so they were able to share their education and early insight about their potential plans, which is very exciting,” he said. “We look forward to working very closely with them and delivering upon their vision for the sport.
“I think we all acknowledge that WRC has got the opportunity to be jet propelled. We’re all fans of it. It’s in our hearts. But part of our frustration always is that why do more people not get what we see? It’s an incredible, visceral experience whenever you come to an event and seeing the best drivers in the world competing in the toughest stages in the world is something to behold and in all manner of different weather conditions.
Clark wants Rally Scotland to attract new fans to the sport
“These guys are very, very special, and we’re always going, ‘Why do more people not get this?’ So we’re working hard and we’ve got lots of ideas about promotion, about Scotifying the World Rally Championship, making sure that it doesn’t look like another [event].
“There’s a couple of other forest gravel rally events in the championship, and we’ve got a job to differentiate ourselves. This part of the world has some great heritage, some great monuments, some great castles. It’s got some great culture. There’s lots of ideas that we can bring to the table.
“We’ve got really supportive partners and tourism authorities and local authorities to make this stuff happen. We’re heartened for what this event can be. And we’re kind of only limited by our imaginations.”
No sentence will better reflect Rally Scotland than that.
When Wales was lost from the calendar in 2019, a generation of British rally fans risked never experiencing what their parents and grandparents once did. And it’s not just about the UK: Rally GB has always been a special rally for fans from all corners of the earth.
Imagination and determination have righted the wrong. But while last weekend felt like a first step towards that, for Clark and his team it was just part of the process.
“I think it’s felt real for an awful lot of time because we’ve been planning the candidate event itself for a long time, making sure that we’re going to do a good job and put on a decent show,” he said.
Rally Scotland's aim is to live up to Malcolm Wilson's billing and become one of the world's best events
“For the FIA, I think they’ve got a good level of confidence in the UK to deliver an event and put on a good show, but notwithstanding that they’ve got a process that we all need to go through, and we can’t be treated any different from anybody else.
“But they are here. I’d like to think that they will be quite impressed. All of the folk from the FIA, they’ve been to the UK and been to Rally GB before, but itwas Wales Rally GB, so they kind of know what the bar was then.
“And I think they’ve come here and their eyes have been… it’s a five-minute drive from the airport, taking them into the service park and looking at the top of the ramp into the service park, showing them what the exhibition conference arena looked like on the outside. Then already they’re blown away.
“Whenever we started the presentation on Wednesday afternoon, I’ve not said a word, but already you know a few things. This massive facility that’s five minutes from the airport. You passed about eight different hotels on the way here. You’ve seen the service park because we took you through it on the way to being dropped off at the hotel for the presentation. And you’ve already got a massive insight into some of the potential of this, and we’re just wanting to pull in some of the dots here about some of the things showing the potential of this event.
“I’d like to think that they’ll go away from here quite excited about what they’ve seen, and they also see the potential of it. So we’ve got to deliver on that, and it’s a not insignificant task. So we’ll be building a team and working on many different levels, and not just a sporting level, all the other things that we’re committed to people.
“But if Malcolm thinks this has good potential to be one of the best events in the world, then that’s the ambition. That’s where the bar is set.”
