Subaru World Rally Team, Colin McRae and Derek Ringer (centre), flanked by Carlos Sainz (right) and Luis Moya (left) with Richard Burns and Robert Reid behind at the end of the 1995 Network Q Rally of Great Britain.
The Man Behind the Name ….
With just over a month to go, Coltness Car Club are now well advanced in their plans for this year’s Colin McRae Forest Stages Rally, which starts and finishes in Aberfeldy on Saturday 5th of October. Currently, the organisers are planning six Special Stages for their penultimate round in both the ARR Craib Scottish Rally Championship and the Mintex British Historic Rally Championship.
However, there are times when the amateur organising team wonder if all the effort is worthwhile. Endless evenings are spent checking the sport’s rules and regulations, plus amendments and updates issued by the governing body. Another requirement is the Safety Plan, a comprehensive document – in this case, all 48 pages of it – which has to be produced to satisfy Duty of Care, Health & Safety and Sporting Regulations on behalf of the sport’s governing body and local authorities.
Time schedules have to be prepared for competitors plus duty rosters for over 100 officials, and there is a need for constant and regular route checks, not an easy task when the rally location is nearly 100 miles from the Car Club’s base.
But if any doubts are ever expressed they are quickly quelled. Around the walls of the club secretary’s offices hang pictures of the club’s, and Scotland’s, greatest rallying heroes, a constant reminder to all why they indulge in such a time consuming enterprise as organising a one day forest stage rally in Scotland.
Colin McRae was not only a member of Coltness Car Club, he was a driving force behind the first ever Colin McRae Forest Stages Rally in 1994. He took a personal interest in the running of the event and undertook Course Car duties most years, even planning his World Rally Championship commitments around his ‘home’ club’s event whenever possible.
Less well known is the fact that Colin’s co-driver during his World Rally Championship winning title campaign in 1995 was another Coltness Car Club member, Derek Ringer, who won the World Rally Championship Co-drivers’ title in 1995 too. Both started their rallying career as drivers, Colin in a Talbot Sunbeam and Derek in a Hillman Imp, but when Derek signed up to sit with Colin in 1986 in a Vauxhall Nova, a world dominating partnership was born.
Coincidentally, both the Talbot Sunbeam and Hillman Imp were originally Scottish-built cars when Rootes Group/Chrysler had a manufacturing plant at Linwood, near Paisley!
But rally organisation is not just a Coltness Car Club initiative, throughout the year, every weekend, there is a navigational or special stage car rally on somewhere in the UK, and they all have to be organised by groups of like-minded volunteers. It is these amateur clubs throughout the UK who do so much to promote the sport and encourage newcomers to take it up. These are truly the unsung heroes of club motor sport, although a little inspiration goes a long way.
Colin McRae was an inspiration then, and is an inspiration today.