The organizers of Rally Great Britain target to find the funding by April with the intention of their event returning to the World Rally Championship in 2024.
More specifically, WRC Promoter event director Simon Larkin, M-Sport Ford (Richard Millener and Malcolm Wilson), Willis, Motorsport UK CEO Hugh Chambers and managing director Jona Siebel had a meeting last Tuesday and discussed about the future of Rally GB. This iconic event is absent from WRC calendar for four years due to COVID-19 pandemic and the low funding.
In the recent years, Wales was the country that hosted a WRC event for United Kingdom at the calendar, but the organizers and the WRC Promoter are considering now to move Rally GB to Northern Ireland. The last winner of Rally Great Britain was Ott Tanak in 2019 when he was driving for Toyota while Thierry Neuville and Sebastien Ogier completed the podium with a Hyundai and Citroen car respectively.
"I think all the individual stakeholders that were present are equally enthusiastic about the prospect of the WRC coming back to the UK and in this particular instance in 2024 in Northern Ireland", Chambers said.
"The difference that that meeting made was making sure that everybody was aligned in a plan to get there.
"I don’t think anybody feels any more enthusiastic about it, but I think we feel more confident that there’s an action plan for all the stakeholders to be aligned.
"And, to put it bluntly, this is a funding challenge.
"It’s not a logistical challenge, it’s not a support of the general public challenge, this is a funding challenge and I think we’re clearer after that meeting about the scale of that challenge and the responsibility and where it sits for that funding to be crystalized.
"This is about being in time for the WRC Promoter to get their calendar in place for 2024 and, probably more importantly, we’re looking at a closed-road event in Northern Ireland and to get the closed-road orders and get them through the process and the system, there’s a very restricted number of closed-road orders that can be issued in Northern Ireland.
"In order for a WRC event to take place it would have to take quite a significant portion of those closed-road orders, so we would need to do so in a timely manner".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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