Rally GB: A victim of its own success

Jari-Matti Latvala's co-driver Miikka Anttila didn't garner a lot of sympathy at Rally GB's post-event press conference. He hadn't, he complained, seen the physio for a while because he'd been working long days. Hmm...

If Mr Anttila attends this year's FIA awards ceremony, he'd better keep his head down and stay out of the way of President Todt. I don't agree with everything Jean Todt says about rallying, but I'm completely with him on the endurance aspect. And Rally GB was, is, hasn't always been but always should be about endurance. Office hours, for me, have no place in our sport.

And if Anttila thinks his days were long, maybe he should have been out with the boys and girls in the mist and rain in the middle of Gartheiniog, setting the stage up for him and his mates well before the sun even considered showing its face on Saturday morning. That was an early start. And a long day.

Granted, those fellas weren't tearing through the woods at maximum concentration, but if it's a day full of genuine focus and stress, take your pick of overstretched hospital wards the length and breadth of Britain.

And relax. Feel better now.

Sorry about that Miikka, but you touched a bit of a nerve there.

A packed and rocking podium ceremony © XPB

Now, Rally GB. What did you think? Good? Definitely. Great? Getting there.

Looking back 14 months, Rally GB has taken a step forward which nobody thought it would be capable of. Nobody came to Cardiff, but Deeside service rocked, 10,000-strong on Saturday night.

And the stages were packed as well. If there was a shortage of anything in Wales last week, it was signs saying 'Car park full'.

For me, that was fantastic. We've waited far too long to see those signs and to sit in traffic to get into a stage of Britain's round of the World Rally Championship.

Mine was, however, the romantic view. Mine was the view of somebody who could double back and nip into a media car park to watch Sebastien Ogier teaching the others how to drive these roads.

The less romantic perspective came from those folks ditching their cars at the side of the A470 just outside Aberangell and making use of Shanks' pony for the next few uphill miles. Fortunately it wasn't raining.

The lack of foresight from the organisers was the primary concern of those being turned away. But when it came to Chirk Castle on Saturday afternoon, that turned to anger. And that's when things started to get a bit silly.

The best viewing of the Chirk stage was just outside the castle, where the stage ran right around a big field. Stand on the hill in the middle and the cars would come right around you. In theory.

In practice, when we got there, you could see very little because the hill wasn't steep enough (the organisers can't be blamed for this...) and the crowds were two-, three- and four-deep at the barriers. But there were thousands of us in the middle of this field. And we'd all come across the same metre-wide footbridge to get there.

Packed four-rows deep, only a select few fans had decent views at Chirk castle © XPB

I soon figured that watching cars wasn't the priority: getting back across the bridge and back to the side of the road where the car was parked was definitely the priority.

Unfortunately, at least 1000 others had a simultaneous eureka moment. Instant bottleneck. And the irony was that there were almost as many folk on the other side trying to come over the bridge to join the chaos. The marshals were letting us cross 10 at a time, so it didn't take long for tempers to fray.

One fella fought his way to the front of the line with his three young children in tow.

"Get to the back!" shouted the marshal.

The father informed the fella his children needed the use the facilities. The field had no facilities - they were all on the far side of the road.

"They'll have to wait to cross," said the marshal.

You have to be a father and you have to have been in this exact position to command the kind of urgency this fella managed.

"OK," said the marshal, suddenly understanding the gravity of the situation. "Get in the trees under here..."

And with that, he lifted the safety tape, ushered them under and sent the children trackside.

Brilliant.

Soon after that, ranks were broken at the back, the ha-ha breached and people made a dash for it. The marshals were overrun, control was lost.

Right behind me came an all too familiar voice.

"What you going to do now then?" was the question from the bobble-hatted one to the deeply harassed marshal. "You've got children in here, too many people in a confined space... health and safety issue coming here, matey. Time for you to make a decision. What you going to do?"

The action became a side note amid a heated scramble for the exit © XPB

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

More voices. Louder voices. Angrier voices.

Now was not the time for me to talk about Chatsworth, 1995 and how we were all having loads of fever.

I kept my head down, not least because a few of them might have read some of my words extolling the virtues of Chirk as the best place to come and watch.

Apologies for that, but in fairness when WRC Live reporter Colin Clark and I tooled around the stage in a golf buggy, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. I couldn't have imagined that scene with this influx of people.

And therein lies the problem. Nobody could have seen this coming.

People wondered why the 'catering village' was so, frankly, pony. It wasn't a village, it was a couple of burger vans with massive, massive queues. Why no more toilets? Why such shocking traffic control? Why no car parks?

It's pretty straightforward really. This is a rally which has spent the last few years dealing in hundreds, not thousands.

If you had a burger van, would you take it to a rally where, for the last decade, you've sold the odd cheeseburger here and there, when actually your time would have been better spent knocking them out at the side of a B-road somewhere in the middle of nowhere. At night.

No. Of course you wouldn't.

But now, with hugely respectable attendance figures, next year will be different. Suddenly, burger vans from across the land will be knocking on Rally GB's door to come and sell their wares.

But the RallyFest stages need more than just a few more foodies. They need a change in mentality, to be organised as mini Festivals of Speed, to be more CarFest than RallyFest. That's what will really work for the family.

Fans often had to contend with huge queues just to get to the stages © XPB

Stricter control of the spectator numbers is another area which has to be looked at to avoid the 10-mile traffic jam the police reported on and around the A5 on Saturday.

Again, without wishing to sound like I'm making excuses, this is a mindset thing. Traffic jams are something Rally GB organisers have dreamed of.

The decision to move the event to within an hour and a half of 34 per cent of the UK population, allied to an upscaled marketing campaign, paid dividends. You could argue there should have been more confidence in the product, but after so many woeful years, confidence had been crushed.

On a more prosaic level, when you're selling tickets on the gate as well as day tickets and event passes, it's impossible to know how many will rock up at the door. If everybody with a World Rally Pass or a Saturday-only ticket had gone to Dyfnant instead of Chirk, there would have been no such problems.

It's impossible to try to second-guess who's going to go where, but the organisers can and will implement more top-down control for the fans.

What made me sad at Chirk was seeing the folk clearly coming to a rally for the first time; there were single mums there whose sons had clearly seen the adverts and subsequently cajoled said parent into bringing them here instead of going to Wrexham United or whatever the local footie team is called.

Those people are lost for good. The young fella had no fever because he couldn't see a thing, while mum had queued for hours to get them in and then waited even longer for the tractor to pull them out of the ploughed field which the grass car park had become.

Right now, those people won't be back. Bridges must be built. And nowhere more so - in the physical as well as metaphorical sense - than at Chirk.

There you have it. That's an honest appraisal of last week's WRC round in Wales. For me, it was a highlight of the year to see my home round of the championship getting back to where it should be - and massive thanks have to go to Jonathan Gill for his tireless work in phoning me to tell me of every new initiative. Jonathan, last week simply wouldn't have worked without you.

Yes, there's more to do. But there can be absolutely no doubt that the right track has finally been found.