Rallying call

When writing the previous Post I was mindful of not including too much detail. At a recent car club meeting I was taken aside by a club member and encouraged “to keep doing what you’re doing” but he then added “I can’t always read your Posts right through, although I do go back to them later when I’ve got time!” A gentle chastisement perhaps for my excessive verbosity?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the current problem. However, it would appear from current and ongoing actions that Forest & Land Scotland has been tasked with generating more income while reducing expenditure.

That means making charges to use ‘public’ land and they are becoming increasingly inventive in this pursuit. In addition to paying a fee to use their roads for rallying, there is an increasing number of additional charges for Permits for named rally officials to gain pre-event access to the forests to conduct recces. I have also heard of one event being charged for “lost income” and this referred to motorhomes and campervans not being able to access an in-forest parking area because a rally was due to use that forest.

There is another issue which is causing concern. Big cuts! I referred in the previous Post that it wasn’t only the roads which needed maintenance and repairs, but ditches too. The ‘straight-lining’ of corners is not only gouging out the drainage ditches but damaging the road edges/foundations leading to more extensive repairs – and costs!

Already some events are having to look at the possibility of introducing ‘corner-cutting preventive devices’. This was something that the McRae Stages Rally encountered in the Perthshire Forests and was a contributing factor in the loss of that event to the sport. Prior to the rally, conical piles of chuckies (pebbles) were sited on the inside of numerous corners to prevent corner-cutting. Simple solution perhaps but it cost much more in terms of time and expense, and I reckon amateur rally organising teams already have more than enough on their plate without this added requirement and cost.

It therefore follows that rallying has a bigger problem. The sport has to prove to a wider public that it is not wasteful and polluting. Rallying is not alone on relying on the automobile for its sport, EVERY other sport uses vehicles. Just as everything we eat, wear or use spends some time on the back of a truck, every other sport uses vehicular transport to carry fans, competitors and equipment to and from venues, and in that respect we are no different from any other sport. Just look at the weekend car parks at stadiums and arenas around the country, not to mention festivals and pop concerts. The difference is only in the equipment we use to participate.

So that is the task facing our sport’s governing body, justifying our right to pursue our sport. No mean task for an organisation with just over 70 employees which has 25 separate motor sports committees reporting to them - of which the Rallies Committee is only one! Car club members and competition licence holders therefore have a job to do, to impress upon their various club committees and event organising teams to urge the various regional associations to make representations to the Rallies Committee to impress upon the sport’s governors the need to protect and promote stage rallying.

While racers and karters have circuits, rallying is much more visible to the general public as it passes through villages and townships on route to the forests. It’s therefore easier for the passers-by to be critical so we have to do our bit too. If anyone challenges you about car use in the forests, ask them how footballers get to their matches, ski-ers get to the snow and how parents take their kids to swimming classes and biking trails.

We all need cars, just some of us use them differently.