Published at 20:04, Thursday, 16 October 2008

TWO of the biggest names in British rallying will be contesting the Roger Albert Clark Rally in November and both of them have strong links to Britain’s most famous rally driver, the late Colin McRae.

Over three days in November one of the biggest events in British rallying will bring spectacle and excitement to Carlisle as rally crews from all over Great Britain – and even Europe – compete in the event.

Among them will be Malcolm Wilson, boss of Ford’s World Rally Championship team, and Nicky Grist, co-driver to McRae during his most successful seasons. Grist was alongside McRae when they won the 1997 Network Q RAC Rally in a Subaru Impreza.

Dovenby-based Wilson, McRae's team manager from 1999 to 2002, will take time out of his team management role to tackle the event in a Ford Escort Mk2, the type of car that took him to prominence as a young rally driver nearly three decades ago.

Welshman Grist, meanwhile, will contest the event for the first time as he co-drives for another legend of British rallying, Phil Collins. They will team up in the Opel Ascona that Collins has recently prepared for use in historic rallies.

The rally starts in Leeds on November 14 and then spends November 15 in North Yorkshire before crossing the Pennines for an overnight halt in Carlisle.

November 16 is spent in the Scottish borders and the Dumfries area, before another night halt in Carlisle. The final day of the rally, November 17, takes crews into the daunting Kielder forest complex in Northumberland before a mid-afternoon finish in Carlisle city centre for the champagne-spraying ceremony.

The rally is named after the late Roger Clark, one of the greatest British rally drivers in the history of the sport and the first man to win Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship back in 1972.

Nowadays, Britain’s round of the World Championship, Wales Rally GB, is permanently based in South Wales. But in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it travelled all over the country as drivers competed on special stages on forest roads in Yorkshire and the Scottish border regions.

Now in its fifth year, the Roger Albert Clark Rally re-lives that era with a competition aimed at amateurs in cars taken mainly from that time.

All of the competition takes place on private land, with public roads only used at slow speed to take competitors from one special stage to the next.

Published by http://www.timesandstar.co.uk