Motor Sport/ World Rally Championship: Johnny Wattersonsets the scene as the sport of rallying in this country is about to write one of the greatest chapters in its colourful history
When the last super-charged car squeals to a stop by the boat quay at Mullaghmore, Ben Bulben will be glowering down from one side, Classybawn Castle, the former summer residence of the Queen of England's cousin, Louis Mountbatten, will peer down from the other and the first chapter of international motor racing in Ireland will have closed.
Sunday's brash finish on the sleepy sweep of the Atlantic Ocean near Sligo that opens north towards Donegal Bay will have completed the dream combination of sport, tourism and the peace process. A splash of sunshine would help but even the Ryder Cup received a relentlessly good kicking from the weather and still the event was a blast.
The World Rally Championship is many things to the organisers and from the marketing of the country to the renaissance in thinking between the relationships between north and south to the biggest sports event to take place in Ireland this year, the four days between Thursday and Sunday of this week will have thrilled a sizeable rump of enthusiasts and onlookers. Quirky Ireland, after all, has more owners-per-head of World Rally Championship (WRC) cars than any other country in the world. We do so love our sumps and cylinder heads.
In purely sporting terms the race could decide who will be this year's World Rally champion with Finland's Martin Gronholm, on 104 points, leading the race and Frenchman Sebastien Loeb just four points behind. The rest of the pack, led by another Finnish driver, Mikko Hirvonen, are 20 points or more adrift, while Ireland's interest rests with a number of figures, not least of all the three MacHales, father Austin and his two sons, Gareth and Aaron. The trio make history in becoming the first three from the same family to take part in a World rally race in WRC cars. The McRaes (father Jimmy and sons, Colin and Alister) did it before but they were in different classes.
For Gareth, this is a chance to look good in the shop window and after a potentially fatal crash in Italy earlier in the year, he has managed to get his Ford Focus car back on the road and focus his mind for some serious on-the-edge racing.
"Yes, it was a bad accident," says the 29-year-old from Rathcoole in Dublin. "We went over the side of a cliff at 81 mph and dropped down 300 feet. Both myself and Paul (co-driver) were lucky to walk away. The safety in the cars is next to nothing. I was airlifted to hospital but I was okay. Bad bruising nothing else. We needed time to get the car back and time to get myself together. The car needed to be built and my confidence needed to be built. But we did that in Donegal and Derry (rallies)."
MacHale and many of the other drivers have an almost impossible task of challenging the works drivers, who have massive resources at their disposal. The Citroen manufacturer has teams as do Ford and Subaru, although, a concerning aspect would be that in 2005 there were six manufacturers. After WRC recommendations that the schedule be reduced from 14 races to a less expensive 12, the FIA bumped up the number of rallies by two in 2004.
Mexico and Japan were added and by 2006 Peugeot, Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Skoda were gone. Go figure.
But the fan base is strong in Ireland and no doubt many will flock to the service areas to see the car surgeons at work. After every group stage the cars visit a designated service park where repairs are carried out by teams under strict supervision during a 20-minute time period. At the end of the day the crews are allowed a further 45 minutes to work on the cars before they are locked away in the guarded parc ferme. It's a type of Ready-Steady-Wrench with any breach of the time periods resulting in penalties. Clearly the more resourced the team the more efficiently they can present pristine machines to their drivers each morning to once again wreck.
The roads will be narrow and bumpy in a peculiarly Irish way and it may rain spades but neither Loeb or Gronholm have come to Yeats Country blind to the demands that lie ahead. They have already cast a cold eye on Irish tarmacadam.
"Yeah, maybe they are not used to grass growing up the middle of roads," says MacHale. "But these are works drivers. They are phenomenal talents and have lots behind them. I don't think anybody will touch the top five and then it's anyones. The likes of Loeb have competed here and won. But I want to be the first Irishman home and the first privateer home. That's my ambition this week."
There are many ambitions. There is a championship to win and there is a motoring federation to impress and there is the Belfast-Dublin love-in to keep passionate and enduring. Perhaps optimistically officials also believe that this is no one-off event like the Ryder Cup. The organisers hope Ireland is going to be a regular stop on the international circuit. The roads were chosen to highlight both the terrain and the landscape. It was also chosen to show that a global event can be staged in remote parts of Ireland just as well as in the main urban centres.
In the pre-event feasibility studies the north west came out better than the east coast in terms of the roads and services. There are 400 kilometres of special stages which need quality roads that are not in the middle of conurbations.
"We hope that this is not a one-off," says Rally Ireland founder Seán O'Connor. "We hope to have it in 2009. Ireland is included in the 2009 calendar provided we do a good job this time. This will be at least once every two years. We could move it but that is not in our thinking now. It doesn't have to be in the Pale. The west and north west can stage international events like these."
O'Connor and co-founder Ronan Morgan also have Former Formula One team owner Eddie Jordan in as the chairman of Rally Ireland, while former Ulster, Ireland and Lions winger Trevor Ringland is acting as deputy chairman. "This is the biggest event organised in England or Ireland this year," adds O'Connor. "We are not charging. It would be cheaper for someone to come from the UK to watch here than watch at the Rally in Wales (where they will be charging) after here."
It's going to cost €4 million to stage and is expected to bring in €46 million as the B&Bs from Belcoo to Bundoran dust down their rooms in the off-season for the mini-cash tsunami. The GAA club in Sligo Regional College will also turn into something resembling a M.A.S.H landing pad for helicopters.
It pointedly begins in Belfast in the grounds of the Parliament at Stormont, where notorious political decisions have shaped Irish history. It will be a stagey, Scalextric-like, televisual start that will roll for four days and conclude at the scene of one of the most notorious killings of the Troubles, where Lord Mountbatten, his grandson, Nicholas, and local teenager Paul Maxwell died in the earl's assassination. This race is indeed something much more than driving immensely powerful cars around normal Ireland's picture postcard back garden.
