Historic Road Rallying: An Alternative to the Stages?

With stage rallying in turmoil, historic road rallying is going from strength to strength.

- Paul Lawrence

You can gauge a rally’s popularity by how fast the entry list fills. If the available places are gone as fast as Bruce Springsteen tickets then it is a winner. The opening round of the Historic Rally Car Register Clubmans Championship is a perfect example.

As we all know, rallying is a broad church. From all-out top-level special stage rallying to events that are little more than a gentle run around a prescribed route on a Sunday afternoon, there is something for all tastes, aspirations and pockets. In the historic world, there is a clear divide between special stage rallying and events that use timed sections on public roads.

Events range in length from one day to several weeks and the HRCR Clubmans Championship brings together the UK’s best one-day events.

Road rallying in its purest sense is alive and well in certain areas, notably Wales, where full-on competition rages through the hours of darkness. But it is a branch of the sport that has faded away from other regions in a world populated by NIMBYs. Yet many of the competitors who once rallied hard though Saturday nights are now tackling historic road rallies.

Ian Doble, the co-ordinator of the HRCR championship is one of them and reckons that it is like a modern day Motoring News Road Rally Championship. For those with a longer memory, the MN championship was the pinnacle of road rallying through the 1960s and 1970s. But times are rather different now.