For a long time we feared the British round of the FIA’s World Rally Championship would never happen this year. The unseemly dispute between the promoters of the rally and its once proud sponsors, the Welsh Development Agency, coupled with the unwelcoming legalistic approach taken to settling the issues, has kept us all on edge. When the rally was back on again the word Wales was ceremoniously dumped from the event title name, though the event will still be run entirely in Wales. Well, 2009 was go but we are still no further on in knowing where the story of Britain’s legendary rally will end up. Let’s therefore enjoy it while we have it, in all its unsponsored glory.

So far as the stages are concerned, there is little change although the total length of the rally is longer than last year. . Missing is the watersplash in Myherin, which drowned the hopes of many competitors last year. There will be no superspecial stage, which in recent years has been held in Cardiff’s Millennium stadium and has caused widespread disruption to the running of the event. There will be a remote service halt at the Showground at Builth Wells in Central Wales. Pre-event Shakedown will be at Margam rather than at the short stage closer to Swansea. The main change is that the rally no longer goes near Swansea, and that there will be no night stages. The event will be run out of Cardiff, meaning that the central service park will be conveniently close to Rally HQ, which is in the newly developed Wales Millennium Centre in the Cardiff Bay area, where the ceremonial start and the finish formalities will also be held. Being held six weeks earlier in the year allows the FIA’s World Rally
Championship season to finish before the end of October for the first time ever, a most welcome decision from the FIA.

The entry level is very disappointing, at 64 cars the smallest field for this event since the start of the FIA's World Rally championship (in 1973). The quality however is there, with entries for no fewer than seven Citroen C4. This event counts for the Production Car World Championship, the champion Armindo Araujo competes on the event but will not be allowed to score more points, as he has already contested the regulatory six scoring rallies this season. There are no Guest entries registered in the lists of PCWRC drivers. Hermann Gassner Junior takes over the Sidvin team's entry, Ralliart New Zealand's usual driver Eyvind Brynildsen drives this time in the Errani Team and Giorgio Bacco drives the Ralliart New Zealand entry instead. Matthew Wilson is the top seeded British driver but professional drivers like Kris Meeke, Guy Wilks, Mark and David Higgins are all missing, as is the new British champion Keith Cronin. Many of these drivers hope however to compete on the IRC’s Rally of Scotland in the third week in November. Rally GB will be the final world championship event for Group N cars before the new rule permitting a 33mm restrictor comes into force in 2010, which hopefully will serve to redress the current performance imbalance with Super 2000 cars.

The FIA championships for Manufacturers’ and for Production Car drivers are settled but just as happened at the final round of the British national championship, the battle for the FIA World Drivers title is a rally promoters dream. Mikko Hirvonen and Sebastien Loeb start with one point between them, so in most probabilities, whichever beats the other can expect to be the champion. For Loeb the championship could give him a sixth successive title, for Hirvonen it would give Finland their first such title in seven years. Only two current or former champions start the event, the other being Petter Solberg, this time entered in the Citroen Junior team. Originally it was expected he could play a major tactical role in Citroen’s challenge for the Makes’ title, but that in fact was settled in Spain in their favour. There are in fact a record of five entries under the Citroen Junior name: the drivers registered for points this time are Solberg and Ogier, and supporting the usual drivers Novikov and Rautenbach will be a C4WRC for Aaron Burkart, a prize drive after his Junior world rally championship challenge in 2008. Burkart said: "I have never been so nervous in my life. I will not even try out the car until three days before the start!"

In the smaller categories there was a surprise and welcome entry for Patrick Magaud, former official driver for Citroen whose active career has been dormant since he contested the French championship for Ford in 2002 and who since then has been active in gravel note crew work on world championship events but the entry has now been withdrawn. Fiestas are entered as the faster R2 version cars in Group A and the ST version in Group N: the leading ST driver will be the German driver Patrick Anglade. Anglade is statistically the leading Fiesta championship driver, but the dropped-scores rule favours Breen, if he finishes. Burco Cetinkaya expects to be at the start despite her crash in Catalunya.

There remain many uncertainties about the event, not the least being whether this will be the final time the rally goes to Wales. The ISC urged the FIA to reintroduce the rally into the 2010 world championship calendar on the strength of the name of the event rather than by any confidence of how or where the event will be held or who will pay for it to be run in the first place. Let’s hope the tradition continues into the future.

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