Sat doing nothing in particular aside from thinking, as I often am, I discovered during the week there was the final for the Protyre MUK Asphalt Rally Championship going on less than 30 minutes from my house. I haven’t been to a rally in a couple of years since I did a short film with our photographer for university and I don’t remember when I last went to an event just by myself, so I packed up my bits and pieces for the day and ventured out on the second day of the event.
There had been the first 2 of 12 stages on the Saturday of the weekend, beginning out of a ceremonial start in Ledbury town before running off to the stages. The remaining 10 were on the Sunday, and I found myself enjoying my spot on the Marcle Hill stage, new for this year, that took the role of stages 7 and 12.
Travelling for a rally is a bit different to events at a circuit. You tend to know where you’re going to end up when you visit a race track, but for rallying things are a little bit different.
Going to a rally always feels like a bit of an adventure. You’re probably going to end up in a forest somewhere, even if you know your local area there’s a solid chance you’ll have no idea where you are like I did, I’d never heard of the little village I found myself in despite it being less than 30 minutes from my home.
Rallying has a serenity, especially if you’ve found your own spot to enjoy the day from. All you hear is nature around you, the bird song and the wind the thing you hear the most. That all fades away as off in the distance you hear a crew launch off the line and fire off up the stage. The sound grows louder. Frantic gear changes and crackles of anti lag echo off in the distance. Before rising to an intense crescendo as a car rockets into view, rotating round the apex of a hairpin and firing off the corner, scrabbling for grip and away over the brow of a hill as the sound fades away.
The morning on stage I spent standing in the village I arrived in, watching from inside a junction next to a little group of white houses. Someone doing construction work there had sat up with a couple of mates on a construction vehicle and were watching with some beers calling out cars coming in occasionally, it all made up a really friendly atmosphere. My conversational company was a pair of local farming lads, one had broken his wrist and was out here nursing a hangover, which he thought was a better way to go than being stuck at home.
As an onlooker rallying can be somewhat hypnotic, there’s a beauty in the rhythm and chaos. Rallying, similar to drifting in my opinion, is akin to a dance, your dance partner being the challenge of the stage, the undulations, the jumps, the surface, all factors you work with to beat the stopwatch more so than those you compete against.
The cars don’t square with their performance unless you know what’s going on. Modern rally cars look remarkably normal, pretty much all of them look like a very worked up hot hatch. The exception being Rally 1 cars you find in WRC, and that’s mainly due to the level of aero being a considerable cut above in complexity to that of Rally 2 cars which routinely top the national level rallying ladder.
There would be an image of a car here but James doesn't have a good camera - Editor
What they make up for in lack of visual fizz, they make up for in pure effect, especially in the chassis department, contours in the road are eaten up and spat out so effortlessly, jumps aren’t much of a challenge for these cars either, not much tends to be aside from large, solid objects like a rock, or a house.
I’d moved elsewhere for the afternoon, taking a walk through the village and a couple of fields to a faster section of the stage following a hay bale chicane, just before the cars shot down a little gulley barely wider than the cars down into another village. I found myself spending the next few hours stood chatting to a trio of marshals, a husband and wife duo and someone new to marshalling. It was her first event and she was enjoying the experience. The other two had been marshalling for years, including having marshalled the Britcar 24H Endurance race Top Gear competed in many years ago. I largely asked questions about marshalling, it’s not a topic I’m hugely familiar with and they were happy to ask me questions and chat. They also told me about their Citroen C1 they do City Car Cup and various Sprints with, Flying Felix Racing if you want to go and check them out.
You could tell in the afternoon that for the crews the chips were down, especially as it was the final stage of both the rally and the championship, anything with anti lag came into the stage with a brutal snarl far more worked up than it was earlier in the day, clearly out for blood. Everyone was pushing to the edge of the road space they had to work with in an effort to maximise every inch they could get.
The day was fantastic, lovely people, great show put on by the crews and the weather stayed mostly dry, a happy surprise. As a day out rallying also tends to be extremely cheap, I only spent £3 or so on the entire day, which wasn’t even for parking, but an ice cream I enjoyed while watching from a well-placed van. It gets you out to a nice location, rallying was actually the first exposure to motorsport I remember going to see, I’d highly recommend it to families who fancy a day out. Plus it always gets the kids into motorsport, which I always view as a good thing.
If you want to find your local rally I would recommend checking out the websites of your local car clubs who often have it advertised, as well as national rally championships who will have the full calendar for the year. They can also help fill you in on the goings on of the season so far so you can go in well informed. Hope you can find one to go and visit soon, it’s never been a bad day out for me and I imagine it would be the same for you too.