Why the WRC can't forget its past

Blink. Missed it. Gone.

Was last Sunday night all the rallying we're going to get on our screens this season? Was the BBC's offering of Top Gear and Sir Chris Hoy's 'Racing Legends' documentary all we can expect? Let's hope not.

But, if it is, what a night it was. We had Kris Meeke tackling Rally GB (or at least the Hafren stage) in a Bentley Continental Sport GB. And we had Olympic hero Hoy telling the story of Colin McRae and revisiting the scenes of Colin's greatest triumphs alongside the 1995 World Rally champion's father Jimmy.

The Meeke bit was great, but miserable; how can Britain's brightest hope for a world rally win be left in a car with heated seats for Hafren?

The McRae bit was doubly great, but supremely sad.

In terms of entertainment, Hoy did an exceptional job in narrating and re-living parts of Colin's career. But, for me, the star of the show was Jimmy.

As a father, I can't begin to imagine what Colin's dad and Johnny's granddad went through in 2007 and continue to live through to this day. I've got to know Jimmy a little bit better in the last year or so and, in that time, it's become apparent that the strength of character that took him to five British Rally Championship titles merely scratches the surface of this solid Scot.

Putting that programme together would have provided as much pain as it would pride for the McRae family, but it needed to be done. We had to remember the man who made British rallying the best in the world for a while.

The only downside was, for me, the overplaying of the end of Colin's life. We know what happened. For you and I, that wasn't what the show was about.

Inevitably, there were memories aplenty to raise a smile and spark a tear. It was Carlos Sainz who really caught me. It spoke volumes for the Spaniard that he took part in a show that would potentially cast him a less-than-favourable light regarding Catalunya, 1995. But Carlos has never been one to shirk responsibility or shrink from confrontation. Sainz's words gave an already impressively strong show even more cachet. That's Carlos for you.

And when, following those horrible helicopter scenes, he uttered the words: "...I miss him," well, the time had come to clear the throat.

Sainz reckons the Monte was not this hard © LAT

Perhaps a good point to move on from Colin. While using the link to Carlos.

Thanks to Volkswagen and Sainz's ambassadorship of the brand, there's time to talk with the two-time champion on WRC rounds these days. And that's what I found myself doing in Monte Carlo on the season's opener.

Hiding from incessant rain inside fort VW, we were talking about the rally and how it had changed down the years. "Come and see..." Carlos said as our conversation turned to tyres and tyre options for the mountains.

Standing on the back of a tyre truck, Carlos lifted the tailgate to raise us into the container, where he proceeded to talk through what he used to be able to do with covers to cope with the ice. Explanation done, we returned to the tailgate, where I expected him to hit the switch and lower us.

Instead, he used gravity to make the six-foot journey back to Mother Earth.

Terror turned to relief to see the King had managed this feat in particularly treacherous conditions. Relief reverted to terror when I realised I now had to do the same without making a massive tit of myself.

Landed. Just. Albeit with solid potential for a broken ankle, given the considerable bulk that had just shot through those unsuspecting bones.

Sainz has talked of Montes he's known, loved and won. And, for him, this year's wasn't too much of a toughie. Take Sisteron, for example.

It was tackled by this year's drivers with plenty of tread, not to mention the odd stud, beneath them. Sure, the asphalt either side of the Col would have been a bit wobbly on winters, but the final ascent via six-inch deep, solid ice was considerably more straightforward. Sainz did it on racers.

Robert Reid © LAT

Slicks. Oh yes, tread-less, grip-less boots that offered Teflon-levels of resistance.

And this wasn't Sainz talking up days passed. It was a statement of fact. In comparison to events he'd done, this year's Monte was simpler.

Another world champion, Robert Reid, backed up that thinking. Reid ventured that slightly less snow would have made the event far harder than it was. With so much snow in certain, key, places, anything other than a winter tyre would have been sporting suicide.

With more marginal conditions, tyre choice would have been a nightmare. The drivers could chose from two compounds of asphalt tyre and a winter with or without studs.

But, even if those marginal conditions had prevailed, it was still nothing like the nightmare Reid and Sainz would have experienced in their time.

Robert thought for a moment, dialling his mind back to the mid-Nineties and the month or so he spent annually howling up and down the Route Napoleon in search of snow, ice, rain and dry tar on which to test.

"Tyres," he says with a smile, "what did we have? Hmm..."

It's all coming back to him now.

"We'd have the 15-inch snow tyre, with and without studs," he says, "then we'd have the 18-inch tyre with a full stud (studs across the full tread pattern), and half stud. We'd have the half-stud on the inside shoulder of the tyre or the outside. Then we'd have the wide tyre, the slick. This would be in a few compounds, as would the intermediate tyre and then the wets as well."

Just when I'm starting to take all of those options in. Reid adds: "And don't forget, we could cut the tyres as well, so we could make a whole new range of options by taking the centre tread block out altogether or cutting out through the shoulder... And then we could take different tyres at the front and the rear."

And here's the best bit. Every potential tyre combination would then be tested on every conceivable surface to build an insanely complex tyre matrix.

"The tyre guys would know," says Reid, "how much time you would win or lose by taking a certain tyre for a certain stretch of the stage. To get that information, we would have spent weeks and weeks testing."

Only four WRC events will have a world champion this year © LAT

Fortunately, both Robert and Carlos will be in Sweden next week. But they're not guaranteed to be at every round and this is something that saddens me slightly - the lack of historical context in the sport right now.

This year we don't have a single world champion contesting the full WRC. When was the last time that happened? Where will the stories come from? I'm all for the future, but our past is both rich and rewarding and we can't forget that.

Not that we're likely to, not while the BBC is putting our pennies to such good use.

That said, and big a fan as I am of days gone by, has Antiques Roadshow not had its day? Let's knock it on the head and revive Top Gear Rally Report instead. William Woollard can come back to present, but maybe Fiona Bruce should work alongside - just to provide some Sunday night continuity...