Damien Smith
Talk about two ends of the rallying spectrum. As Kalle Rovanperä was skilfully picking his way through the Acropolis Rally stages ravaged by Storm Daniel to take another step towards a second World Rally Championship title, I found myself bouncing around in the back of a Toyota Hilux chasing an eclectic bunch of classic cars on bucolic country lanes in a Middle England September heatwave.
Only gently competitive? Compared with the cut and thrust of the WRC, of course. But tell that to my queasy stomach, which has only just settled after a day of incessant churning. Any rally, even a regularity rally run on public roads such as the second round of the one-day Hero Challenge, features a heightened degree of intensity.
HERO’S DAY OUT
Hero is the Historic Endurance Rally Organisation, which specialises (as the name suggests) in epic competitive adventures, often in far-flung corners of the world. But as a taster for novices and a fun warm-up for experienced crews, the three Challenge events it runs in the UK are comparatively bite-sized – although having now experienced one, it’s clear that a great deal of work goes into planning routes and marshalling checkpoints, even for a domestic one-dayer.
Regularity rallies take place on open public roads, so they are absolutely not about speed. The navigator counts more than the driver in this corner of motorsport, because the key is consistency within the boundaries of the law and clocking in and out of the checkpoints on time. Success is judged by penalty points and racking up as few as possible.
The 73 crews who took the start and criss-crossed three counties to log 134 miles did at least get to exercise their inner hooligan on the event’s four tests. These are held on private land, and here speed and accuracy around a coned course is the perfect combination. Handbrake turns and billowing dust marked the two on gravel at Bill Gwynne’s rally school, while a tidy approach paid dividends on the pair of tests on Shenington’s narrow kart track – perfect for the Minis, less so for a pre-war Bentley Derby Special.
FAMILY AFFAIR
An MGB GT V8 took the overall win, with driver Steve Robertson giving all credit to his navigator son Thomas (subbing for mum Julia) for logging only 50sec of penalties – two fewer than Stephen and Alexander Chick in their Datsun 260Z.
Regularity rallies tend to be family affairs, crews often made up by any combination of husbands, wives, sons, daughters, siblings and cousins.
John Lomas took particular p
