Rally - And so it begins

Yet another visit to the loft. This time, the lever arch files for the years 2000 to 2009. Regardless of what you might find on other internet rally results sites, these are the complete, final and most accurate sets of results from ten years of the Scottish Rally Championship.

The main problem facing anyone researching results is defining Class Winners. Many sets of ‘Final Rally Results’ list primary award winners and class award winners, and therein lies the difference. A class award winner is not necessarily the actual class winner. That’s because many events in the past excluded the top three or top six, sometimes even the top ten, from ‘winning’ a class award.

In other words if a 1600cc car was to finish in the top ten, it might not necessarily ‘win’ the first in 1600cc class award, that would instead go to the ‘first’ 1600cc car outside the top ten.

Confused? It gets worse. There could well be a mixture of WRC, GrpA and GrpN cars in the top ten places overall on an event and none of them might feature as ‘class award winners’ that would go to the first of those runners outside the top ten, six or three, depending on the individual event regulations 

And just suppose one event counts towards different championships, for instance the SRC and BTRDA and perhaps a couple of regional or Association/Club championships, a different set of results may well have to be produced for each of them to allow coordinators to assign points to their registered contenders. 

Championship coordinators have therefore to be very careful when allocating points and researchers too, as well as purely interested rally fans, have to ensure that they are working from the ‘correct’ sets of results. 

Which means each set of rally results from this decade will have to be gone through individually to ensure that the relevant class winners are accorded that status and credited as such in the book. That process was undertaken with the two current books for 1980-1989 and 1990-1999 and so it will have to be done again for this next book covering the ten years 2000-2009.

So anyone who has a trophy which hails them as Class 1, 2 or 3 winner on such and such an event might well be wrong. They may well be the class award winner but not the actual class winner, there is a difference.

No-one quite knows why this practice is common in rallying, but it was generally regarded as a means of spreading out the trophies and preventing the outright winners from hogging all the silverware.

Naturally the ‘Scottish Rally Championship’ book series will credit the ‘actual class winners’ and if anyone disagrees I’ve got a big pal with a short temper - and he’s awfy friendly with The Bears!

https://fife-motor-sports-agency.square.site/