RACING LINES
Damien Smith
RAC Rally was heartening as ever; on-the-ground report in the mag soon
By tradition, the World Rally Championship should have been decided in a thick soup of mud and mist, the sport’s top stars slithering through treacherous British forest roads on a good old Rally GB winter slog. But there hasn’t been one since 2019. Instead, Toyota trio Elfyn Evans, Sébastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanperä discarded their bobble hats and went to a desert to decide who would be champion on the first WRC rally to be held in… where do you think? Saudi Arabia, of course. Where else in 2025?
British motorsport’s governing body is chiselling away at plans to revive Rally GB, perhaps in the north-east of Scotland. Meanwhile, it has fallen to enthusiasts to keep tradition alive, via a five-day epic that echoes the glory days of what used to be known as the RAC (then the Lombard and for a time in the 1990s the Network Q). The Roger Albert Clark Rally – named in honour of the late, great British rally hero who won the RAC twice in Ford Escorts in 1972 and 1976, and whose initials just happened to match the beloved event with which he will always be most associated – represents the essence of what rallying used to stand for (and still does for the purists).