The day McRae went stock car racing

I'd paid my money, so I waited. Then I fell asleep. And that was only Sunday. After a working press day on Monday, I fell asleep again. I want my money back.

Only I don't. Because I've got it taped, and the Daytona 500 only comes around once a year - even if it took more than a year for this one to come because of a Super Bowl clash and then the rain.

Being a rally man, I spend quite a lot of my time in the rain, so you might be surprised at my tolerance for a bunch of racers who wait for the sun to come out before they start their engines. But I love NASCAR in the way I love Group 4 Escorts; they sound beautiful and are best driven with a degree of lock on turn-in to a corner.

Granted, a well-driven Group 4 motor spends much more of its competitive lifetime on the lock stops than Matt Kenseth's Roush Fenway Ford will do, but no matter.

I have one person to thank for getting me into NASCAR and that person was Colin McRae.

Ten years ago this year, I worked with McRae on a drive in the ASCAR Championship at Rockingham. ASCAR for those who don't remember (and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm on a slightly sticky wicket when it comes to only turning left) had five-litre V8 engines and were capable of pulling close to 180mph.

With those numbers in mind, it came as no surprise that McRae wanted in.

I was privileged to be the only journalist attending his first ever test of such a thing, and McRae was on form. It was just like the first scene from Days of Thunder, except we were in Northamptonshire not Charlotte and Colin, Jason Plato - there to show McRae the ropes - and I took to the track in a SEAT Leon rather than on a motorbike.

So, three-up in a Leon, McRae and I shared our first oval experience. And I was right behind him. Like, right behind him. He'd insisted on sliding his seat forward, compromising his own position behind the wheel to make sure there was room for me - telling me that if he was going up against he wall, I had to too.

Dario and Marino Franchitti speak to McRae before his ASCAR debut, in which he finished sixth © LAT

And there we were: a handful of seconds later going into corners at 100mph. I hadn't expected that. For some ridiculous reason, I'd thought the Scot and one of Britain's best racing drivers with a roof over his head might play themselves in and have a look at apexes and exits at a sensible speed. This was a sensible speed for them.

It was an insane demonstration of McRae's comfort zone. He was talking, taking everything in and playing with the car inches away from the wall.

But there was something much faster waiting. And, fortunately, there was only one seat.

When the car was fired up for the first time, Colin couldn't help himself. The grin spread wide across his face.

"Let's make that hole in the ozone layer a bit bigger," he said with a smile as he slid in for the first time. Suffice to say, by the end of his test, he was the quickest rookie ever round Rockingham.

I can't remember too much about his race. He finished sixth, but I think a big slide exiting the pits (reasonably predictable...) might have damaged the transmission. But he loved it. And couldn't stop talking about it.

"The old leg was going in there," he said, talking about his right knee which always shook a little bit to reflect the adrenalin coursing through the 1995 world champion's veins.

And that was when we got talking about the bigger picture of NASCAR. McRae wanted to get out there and give it a go. We talked to a few people who were looking into getting it sorted, but as time passed and Citroen beckoned for 2003, the momentum was lost.

It remains one of my biggest regrets that I didn't push harder to pick this one up when McRae had a bit more time on his hands. But, like everything, once Colin had finished in the WRC, there was going to plenty of time for that...

I'm sure McRae would have loved the drama of Monday's race and, who knows, if things had worked out differently, he might event have been there in the middle of the pack chasing Kenseth.

The wait for the race was made slightly easier by the opening rounds of the British Rally Championship, in Bournemouth, and the IRC opener in the Azores. I was on the south coast for Rallye Sunseeker for the first time in 10 years and, while the dash down the seafront has sadly gone, it's been replaced by a ceremonial start in Poole quay, which was busy and buzzing on Friday night.

I was down there to take a look at the new formula for BRC. Gone are the four-wheel-drive cars, replaced with two-litre two-wheel-drive cars.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean the return of the Renault Maxi Meganes and SEAT Ibiza kit cars. What it does mean is the more production-based R3 category cars such as the Renault Clio and Citroen DS3. While these cars are shorn of the noise and drama of the F2 cars of 15 years ago, they look every bit as quick in the right hands.

Clio driver Mark Donnelly took his first BRC win on the Sunseeker and he and Finland's Jarkko Nikara (DS3) were the class of the admittedly small field of cars capable of challenging at the front.

Mark Donnelly powered to his first BRC win on the Sunseeker © LAT

The problem is that R3 cars remain relatively new and, therefore, relatively expensive. It's perfectly conceivable to buy and run a well put together Subaru Impreza or Mitsubishi Lancer for less than the cost of keeping an R3 on the road this season.

That's the argument against the change of regulation for this season.

The argument for the change is that, while it is might well be relatively cost effective to build a Group N four-wheel-drive car, not enough people did that. The last couple of years of BRC haven't exactly been flooded with that kind of frontrunning kit, have they? No.

So something had to change.

This is going to be a year of transition, but next season, as the cost of cars drops and the second-hand market becomes a little more buoyant, then we will see more cars at the front of the field. It's not too much of a hardship, though. You didn't have to wait too long to see more cars on their doorhandles, courtesy of the fight for R2 honours and a determined drive from Elfyn Evans in his Fiesta.

Citroen, Ford and Renault have all signed up for the new BRC. Granted, they're not all turning out factory cars and paying drivers handsomely to sit in them, but they are here and they are showing an interest in the sport. And that's a start.

They're at the table and they're listening. It's BRC manager Mark Taylor's job to turn that interest into something more tangible and sustainable. Yes, we want manufacturer cars back providing a professional element to the top tier of out sport in this country, but at the same time we need to keep the cars attainable and affordable to make sure a well-heeled and well-wheeled privateer can still get in there and cause some trouble.

I headed north from Bournemouth encouraged for the future of the BRC and happy that Sunseeker remains a great rally.

There were a couple of clouds on an otherwise sunny Saturday, though. One was the absence of David Bogie. Last year's Rallye Sunseeker winner is sticking with his Mitsubishi and was, therefore, ineligible for the international event. Bogie's pace improved tremendously last season and his comfortable win on the Snowman Rally last month demonstrated how his speed will be missed from this year's BRC.

Another BRC event winner who was badly missed last weekend was Marty McCormack. The man who made the Citroen DS3 R3 the car to beat on last year's International Rally Northern Ireland is struggling to find the finance for a season in which he could and should have starred.

Like the BRC, the IRC looked to be struggling for numbers. The Azores Rally was really all about one man and one team, Andreas Mikkelsen and the Skoda UK Motorsport squad. The Norwegian's rich run of form - which carried him to victory on the last two IRC rounds of last season - was enough to get him home ahead of Juho Hanninen in the mid-Atlantic. Mikkelsen and Skoda UK are looking irresistible in the title hunt this year and we're only one round in.