No. Colin McRae was adamant. It wasn’t happening. Not this time. Sitting out the front of the Royal Hotel Sanremo, the then Citroën driver wasn’t kidding.
It was a no.
Unless…
“The only way I’ll do it is over beer,” he grinned. “Up to you, David.”
The Sunday night after a round of the World Rally Championship is always frantic. With thousands of words to write (and contrary to what might be a commonly held view…) beer was not going to help with productivity. But to write the McRae column, I needed to talk to Colin. And that wasn’t going to happen without the help of our good friends Nastro and Azzurro.
An evening with Colin McRae would always be a memorable one
Peronia delivered, the 1995 world champion began with the tale of woe that had led his Xsara WRC to finish what would be Italy’s final mainland round of the world championship in a pretty average sixth place.
A couple of beers in and things got better. And worse. Richard Burns arrived and decided more beer was needed. At that point, I gave in and decided to enjoy the moment, accepting that my night was going to be long and late.
RB took a long swig of beer, while McRae picked up the Englishman’s Alpinestars gloves from the table. He inspected tag line: “One goal. One vision” and smiled.
“Tell me, Burnsie… what was the goal on this one?”
Richard had finished one position lower than Colin after a similarly miserable event (for reasons that would become tragically clear just a handful of weeks later) aboard his Peugeot 206 WRC. And so it began.
Richard Burns' final outing in Sanremo was not successful, but we would sadly only find out what was behind it later
Was the McRae column any good? To be honest, I don’t remember, but I doubt it.
The night on the other hand, was great. One of those moments when you just have to go with it.
Departing Sanremo the next morning was done with both a heavy head and a heavy heart. I loved that northern Italian town sitting in the foothills of the Ligurian Alps. How could you fail to as a rally fan? Sanremo said it all. Granted, I’d arrived too late for the absolute classics going across the top of the country from the asphalt mountain roads to Tuscany’s glorious gravel, but still, I was sure of one thing: Sardinia was no Sanremo.
I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t have disagreed more with the decision to shift Italy’s round to the island of Sardinia and town of Olbia in the name of another rough gravel rally. Granted, Tarmac’s not my favourite surface, but the series needed its history and Sanremo was very much part of the sport’s fabric.
Not even a classic Subaru-Petter Solberg win at Sardinia’s maiden WRC counter could change my mind 20 years ago. Admittedly, I did like the opportunity to listen to my Italian colleague Marcio Giordo wax lyrical about Costa Smeralda in his own backyard, but this still wasn’t the real deal.
For the first four or five years, the question was the same: when do we go back to the mainland? When will Sanremo be back?
But then something changed. Sardinia was accepted. It was quickly becoming a challenge in its own right. Of its own character. Those soft sandy stages which evolved so significantly from the first to second pass were creating stories, legends in their own right.
My colleague Jon Scoltock highlighted some of the best moments from the last two decades of Italian island rallying in his engaging piece earlier this week – but for me I think it was Jari-Matti Latvala’s win in 2009 which really sealed the deal. I remember talking this one through with the Finn at the time. More than most he understood and sympathized with my diffidence. But seeing how much that victory meant to him, just weeks after he’d tumbled down a Portuguese mountain in one of the WRC’s most terrifying accidents ever, helped cement an appreciation of Sardinia.
That appreciation evolved to a genuine love for rallying on the island. Two decades on, Sardinia’s is now very much the accepted home of Italy’s round of the World Rally Championship.
