RAC Rally

Photo courtesy of Mark Shadforth

Since its inception, the RAC rally has always been regarded as one of the toughest events on the motorsport calendar. 

My late father did the rally many times in the 60's and 70's and got finishers' medals in 1968, 69, 71 and 72.

We did the RAC together in 1986 and 87 but both times never made it out of the Keilder complex. we planned to do it in 1988 and hoped for third time lucky but unfortunately he passed away before we could do the rally.

I'd always wanted to have another crack at it and so I entered the 2021 edition, but not in my trusty Mini, Bessie. the event would be too rough for her, so I bought a well know Mk2 Escort and christened her Gertie after my Dad's mother.

The 2021 Roger Albert Clark Rally was scheduled to be the longest and toughest UK special stage rally in 30 years, covering a massive 350 competitive miles on forest special stages over 5 days.

The biennial event in November, featured more competitive rallying than ever before, with a significant increase over the 300 miles of the 2019 rally.

Carlisle was the host city for the event and the rally was based there until it transferred to Wales on Saturday night.

The rally started on 25 November for a loop of five stages in the western end of the notorious Kielder forest covering 42 stage miles into the evening.

Friday was a long, challenging day in the central block of Kielder, Europe’s biggest man-made forest, taking in eight stages and 112 stage miles.

The pressure was kept up on Saturday with classic stages in Scotland, including Ae, Twiglees and Craik in a route of eight stages and 66 stage miles.

On late Saturday evening, or very early Sunday morning, crews relocated to Wales for Sunday and Monday and a further 130 stage miles.

The Welsh route included some classic forest stages as well as stages that have not been used for several years.

Phil Harris said “The event promised to be extremely tough, and it was going to be doubly hard for me driving a car I’d never competed in before. Before the event, I’d never even driven it in the dark and most of Keilder stages on Thursday and Friday were due to be at night for us!”

“The event was always going to very, very hard but then we also had storm Arwen to contend with on Friday night.”

“The 100 mph storm blew down many trees in blizzard conditions and we were on the last stage of the day when it got cancelled due to fallen trees on the road. We managed to get out of the forest using an access road and found our chase car.”

“We crawled back along the road in virtually nil visibility and eventually got to a village where we were turned back due to a big tree blocking the road. We took a detour but found that road was blocked too.”

“After another detour we ended up just outside Langholm where the road was blocked by three trees. All the roads back to Carlisle were blocked so we had to sleep in the car overnight while it was minus 6 outside, 100 mph winds and a blizzard. And we had no heater!”

“Eventually the next day the road was cleared and we were able to continue the rally.”

“Another 2 days of hard rallying ensued and eventually after 5 days we finished in Carmarthen. Only 40% of crews who started the rally completed all the stages, so it has been a huge achievement to get to the finish.”

“And we came 6^th in our class, which I was delighted with considering that I’d never driven the car before and we’d had to battle through the worst storm in years!”

"Gertie never missed a beat and it did indeed prove to be third time lucky!"