The more you think about it, the more it hurts. In a fortnight, we should have been getting ready for the first ever World Rally Championship recce in Ypres.
Not this time.
It was always going to be a big ask to run the event in the face of the building second wave of COVID-19. And then there was the whole moral square to circle: would it have been right to travel to an area where hospitals and a health care system were already under increasing pressure and potentially add to that burden?
There were similarities to be drawn – albeit for entirely different reasons – to last year’s Rally Australia, when it became clear that having emergency services sitting at the side of a stage while they could be helping or getting ready to help in a the fight against the horrendous bush fireswhich were spreading across the east side of the country was unacceptable.
I’ll be honest and up front here and tell you that Ypres hasn’t always been my favorite event. I love Belgian rallying and was enchanted by my first trip to Condroz a lot of years ago. But Ypres… I didn’t really get it. Until now.
I’ve been doing this job a while now and it’s rare that I get quite as excited about the potential for a new round of the WRC as I did for this one.
YPRES READY TO HOST A FUTURE WRC ROUND
ALAIN PENASSE SAYS THE ORGANIZING TEAM HAS "EVERYTHING READY" TO STEP UP IF REQUIRED NEXT YEAR
The reason? Unpredictability.
Like the man behind the rally Alain Penasse said, Ypres would have been an impossible to call a thriller.
It would have been an autumnal Monte. I love the Monte and I really love the fall.
Going through some notes, it dawned on me that the loss of Ypres meant the loss of an opportunity to talk to the WRC’s most influential Belgian. Not Thierry Neuville, the FIA’s rally director Yves Matton.
Matton is the man steering the sport right now, but first and foremost he’s a rally fan from Belgium. Here’s what he had to say when I asked him, on a personal level, what it meant to see the Belgian flag on the 2020 calendar.
“It’s like Estonia,” he said. “We are very small country and rallying is really part of the DNA of the Belgians. We have a big history of people involved in motorsport and it’s not only the pride in the Grote Market, a start there will be [would have been] emotional.
“The fact that we go through Belgium to Spa-Francorchamps, it’s also in my memories, something very important. And to achieve a WRC event in these two places is something very special.”
Is this the end of Belgium’s WRC bid? Absolutely not.
Penasse is sage enough to know the WRC’s calendar is set for next season. But he’s also sensible enough to know it’s highly unlikely the timetabled 12 rallies will run in the preordained order we see them today. Ypres is ready, willing and clearly able to step in and do the job.
Having seen the Ypres Rally Belgium team at work – both this year and in previous seasons – it’s very clear the event is one of the most capable around. But what I really like about Ypres is the self-confidence within this great rally.
When the relationship with the European Rally Championship started to change in 2016 and the Ypres organizers felt they wanted no more part of the ERC, they had the confidence in their own product to step away from the ERC.
Did anybody notice the absence of the ERC? Did the quality of the 2017 event drop? Not a bit of it.
Ypres is ready for the biggest stage of them all. And I’ll be more than happy to stand stage-side and see it.
