The RAC Rally that made McRae

Twenty years ago this month, Colin McRae won Britain's round of the World Rally Championship for the first time. But DEREK RINGER, the man calling the notes beside him, reckons the bruising 1990 event was the one that really made the difference. He recounts an incredible story of survival

Without the 1990 RAC, it's quite possible, none of those others would have happened.

The 1990 season had been a tough one and there was nothing sorted for the following year. We were in an RED-run Ford Sierra Cosworth 4x4 on that year's RAC and we'd done the Audi Sport Rally in the car as a test, finishing second to team-mate Russell Brookes.

Starting from Harrogate, the first day was about the usual stately home stages - the so-called Mickey Mouse stages. In Chatsworth (SS5), we took a back corner out of the car coming through a gate with a stone wall behind it.

We dragged it out of the stage, where we had emergency service waiting. The boys put a new [left-rear] corner on the car, I can't remember, but they might have put a rear diff in it as well. We finished the day. But that was just the start of this adventure...

The second day was in Yorkshire and those stages were OK until, in the dark, in Cropton, we completely wrecked the car. We were down in a ditch on my side - as usual - and it was pretty badly damaged.

McRae had battled through the British rally scene to get chances like the 1990 RAC © LAT

When we came out of the stage, I was on the radio to John Millington [now M-Sport logistics chief] who was co-ordinating for RED then. John was moving vehicles around to get people to us to get the car fixed. We did that, then went into the last stage of the day, which was a shorter one in Boltby.

I remember at that point engineer Ray Sherratt had basically had enough. We had wrecked so much of his stuff that he said: "This is the end, I'm going."

And we were only two days in.

We started heading north the next morning. The first stage of Tuesday was Hamsterley and we came out of there with the engine knackered. Basically, that was it. But the team reckoned, if we could keep it going, we could change the cylinder head that night - we had a spare engine in one of the service barges.

Colin said: "That's ridiculous, we're not going to last that long."

The van with the engine in it was already up in Kielder, where we were heading. It was parked out the back of a pub and John was on the phone to the pub trying to make arrangements for the boys to get the cylinder head off the spare engine.

At that time, there was no communications plane or anything like that. We had radio contact between the rally car and the chase car, but we still needed to be within about six miles of them for that to work. It wasn't like today, there was no tracking or constant contact, but we didn't know any different in those days.

What was different was that we would have had an emergency service vehicle waiting for us after around three-quarters of the stages on the route. But sometimes you didn't have them waiting for you and that's when you needed to be a bit creative and you needed a bit of luck.

It wasn't just McRae in trouble: factory Lancia driver Juha Kankkunen would crash out © LAT

I might not have been the best co-driver for reading notes or massaging an ego, but I was pretty good at crisis management!

And this was a bit of a crisis with the engine on its way out. We nursed the car up the road and got to the pub car park, the boys changed the head and we got on our way to the next stage. We were late, but there was a queue of cars, so I still managed to get the time I wanted.

Low and behold, the cylinder head had different cams in it, which Colin much preferred - they probably had an extra 500 revs or 10bhp at the top end. We went through Kielder like scalded cats. It was going pretty well now. We'd had a gearbox changed at the side of the road, but otherwise it was good.

And then we set some fastest times in Yair and Castle O'er - stages we knew pretty well, but it was still a big thing to get those first fastest times at world championship level. That was a special moment on the event. That made a few people sit up and take notice of us.

Colin wouldn't have been the sort of guy who would have patted himself on the back for doing those fastest times. He would have looked at the times and said: "I'll have another one of those."

At that part of the rally, things were going well - we were going quickly in the stages just inside Scotland. We were definitely feeling at home!

The Sierra was only slightly bent at this point © LAT

Getting ready to go back into Kielder in the dark, things were looking up for us. We were inside the top 10, which is where we'd thought we would like to be before the start, and we hoped all the problems were behind us...

I'd been having trouble with the door on my side of the car since the crash in Cropton the previous day. At that point, there wasn't a door or a window that really fitted perfectly, so the inside of the car was covered in mud.

In the end the boys welded the door shut on my side. That fixed the problem. It did also mean that I couldn't get out of the car. And that was why the scrutineers made the team open the door again.

Fortunately, the boys found the bolt from a farm gate and put that on the door to keep it shut - which is how it got the name, 'The Shed'.

Towards the end of Tuesday (day three), we were servicing the car and getting ready to drive up to a stage, I think it was Falstone, when the starter motor failed. We decided to change it; there was no point going into a long stage like that with no starter. We were 10 minutes late going up to the start. I think we might have run out of our penalty-free lateness by now...

Anyway, we were horsing our way up to the start when a driveshaft broke on the way in. I got on the radio to tell the team. The service van had packed up and left, but the chase car came up towards us and we put a new driveshaft in. We made it to the overnight halt in Newcastle where we did a precautionary gearbox change.

World champion Carlos Sainz won the event for Toyota © LAT

The next morning we discovered the new 'box was faulty so the team had to put the old one back in before we could get away to the first stage in Harwood. That stage started at six in the morning, so this would have been in the very early hours!

The final day took us back through Kielder again and over to the Lakes and we had a pretty clean day. We finished the event in sixth and without any penalties.

For me, that rally was one of the most important for Colin and I. OK, winning the world title on the 1995 RAC was obviously very important, but without 1990 we might not even have got there.

Colin showed real speed on that rally. We'd come through the Vauxhall Nova and the Group N cars, but then for that rally we were there with a good car to take on guys like Markku [Alen], [Juha] Kankkunen, they were all there.

And, don't forget, that car was bent like a banana! It was a proper, throw-it-away-at-the-end job. And he set fastest times in it.

I'd known about Colin's ability in a four-wheel-drive car. We had done the Swedish in a Ford Sierra XR4x4 the year before, driving the same car Stig Blomqvist had used to finish second on the 1988 Swedish. Stig decided the car was no good for him in '89 and went away and got himself a big Audi.

During the event, Stig came over and was very complimentary about the times Colin was doing; we were in the top 10 on the first day from a start number of 55. We had a succession of gearbox problems, but still finished [15th].

As well as this being a big one for our careers, that 1990 RAC stands out for the way the RED team just kept battling on. Don't forget, this was a private team, we weren't a big manufacturer outfit. It was incredible how we just kept on throwing parts at the car and kept putting it back together at the side of the road.

That 1990 event is one I won't forget for a long time.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
By David Evans

From 1991 onwards, British rallying expected. It had been too long since Roger Clark's second and final RAC Rally win in 1976. The time had come. The time was coming.

McRae and Ringer had signed with Prodrive to drive a Subaru Legacy RS in the 1991 British Rally Championship and on selected WRC rounds. For every fan up and down the land, November couldn't come quickly enough.

And for two days, the Scotsmen delivered breathtaking speed. They led a WRC round for the first time.

"The 1991 RAC was the first event where the Subaru ran an engine developed by Prodrive rather than in Japan," says Ringer. "Immediately, you could feel there was an extra 30 or 40bhp. I remember after shakedown I went to David Richards and told him I thought we could win the rally. He kind of looked at me...

"There was a certain Pirelli tyre which Colin favoured and we ran it in Dyfnant and Hafren and that was enough to get us into the lead, which was a special moment. We ran another set of those tyres for the next stages and they didn't work quite as well - we lost the lead."

But they remained in the thick of the fight until the first proper corner in Grizedale, where they rolled and dropped 12 minutes. Later that day the Subaru went off the road again in depths of Kielder's darkness.

Ringer says: "I saw David again after the event and said I was sorry it didn't work out. He replied: 'I'm not concerned. You have shown us what the car can do.'

McRae led again in 1992 © LAT

"Grizedale was pretty unkind to a year later as well. We were leading the event coming out of Wales and had a long road section up to the Lakes from Chester.

"We had a brake problem with the car and the team decided to work on it just out of Chester, meaning we had to drive the rest of the road section fairly briskly.

"We were on our way into the stage when a spectator came over a crest in the middle of the road. We took to the bank to get past him. That caused some damage to the transmission and I think we went off the road soon after."

The pair ultimately finished sixth, but such was the weight of expectation both in and out of the car, a repeat of the result that had been such a breakthrough just two years earlier was entirely forgettable.

The snow came for 1993. But McRae and Ringer arrived at the Birmingham start as WRC winners, having broken their duck in Auckland earlier that season. That meant the Legacy was confined to history in favour of the Impreza 555.

Like they had 12 months earlier, the Brits headed up the M6 out of Wales and into the Lakes in the lead. Through Grizedale East and West, the nation held its breath. They made it through... in the lead.

Surely this time? In William Woollard-speak, Grizzly Grizedale lead to Killer Kielder. And it was the latter that did for them in 1993.

RAC 1993 brought snow and more disappointment © LAT

"We got a branch through the radiator in Kershope," says Ringer. "We drove about 15 kilometres out of the stage, but it was finished.

"What made it even worse was that I'd left my car in Birmingham. We'd retired about an hour from home, but I had to drive all the way down to Birmingham in the most depressing circumstances, pack up my kit and then drive all the way back up the road.

"There was a lot of heartache around at the time. Yes, we'd won in New Zealand and we were winning in Asia-Pacific, but there were still some crashes and it was tough at the time.

"Everybody wanted that RAC so much."

And in 1994, it came. But it could so easily have been taken away.

McRae's team-mate Carlos Sainz was fighting Toyota's Didier Auriol for the world title and for much of the event, it looked as though McRae and Ringer might have to sacrifice the win for the Spaniard's title.

They had led from the third stage on Sunday in Chatsworth and stayed ahead, passing the scene of their demise on the previous three years.

"I don't remember too much about the 1994 event," says Ringer, "apart from the potential that we might have had to slow down.

"That was causing quite an amount of friction in the team. If we had been told to slow down, somebody would have been lynched or the spectators would have burned down Prodrive! It really meant that much to everybody."

There was no lynching or acts of arson.

And there was a British winner of the RAC Rally.

COMPREHENSIVE RALLY GB COVERAGE

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