Rally Barbados - 4-5 Jun 22

NEW LOCATION, NEW SPONSOR FOR KING OF THE HILL

Posted: May 6, 2022 9:24 AM

The Barbados Rally Club confirmed today (Friday) that King of the Hill, the sprint event used since 2008 to seed the running order for Sol Rally Barbados, will be staged at a new location and with a new title sponsor. First Citizens King of the Hill on Sunday, May 29, will run on a 4.5-kilometre course from Content via Fortress Hill and Dukes to finish at the Vaucluse Raceway in St Thomas.

The First Citizens Group, which has a wide footprint across the Eastern Caribbean in Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Costa Rica and its flagship location, Trinidad and Tobago, is already title sponsor of the Barbados Motoring Federations’s (BMF) R5 Rally Championship, of which KotH will be the sixth round.

The CEO of First Citizens, Cheryl-Ann La Roche said:
“As the title sponsor of King of the Hill, we at First Citizens look forward to the passion, thrills and the engagement of competitors and fans at one of the premier events on the local rally calendar. This is our second partnership in motor sports, the first being our title sponsorship of this year’s R5 Rally Championship. As the excitement mounts, we look forward to a successful rallying series and we are confident that this partnership with the Rally Club will serve to benefit all stakeholders, through a sense of camaraderie, family and community.”

Rally Club PRO Neil Barnard welcomed the bank’s decision to expand its involvement:
“King of The Hill is the event that turns the ‘rally hype’ volume up to full and the Barbados Rally Club are thrilled that First Citizens will be sponsoring the 2022 edition.”

After the inaugural event in 2008 at Turners Hall in St Andrew, KotH moved venues, first to Stewarts Hill in St Philip, then Sailor Gully in St Peter, before finding a more permanent home on Hangmans Hill in St Thomas, where it ran from 2011 to 2018, apart from 2013, when it moved to Luke Hill in St Lucy. For the past two years, the event returned to the south-east corner of the island and Stewarts Hill, where Dane Skeete was the most recent winner in 2020.

Jamaica's Jeff Panton has won a record four times, back-to-back between 2016, when he tied with Simon Jean-Joseph after a rain-affected final run, and 2019, with Roger Skeete a three-time winner (2009, '11 & '15). Paul Bourne (2008 & '10) and England's Paul Bird (2012 & '14) have each won twice, while Neil Armstrong has the distinction of being the only driver to have won overall (2013) and been Top 2wd (2011). Roger Mayers has won 2wd four times, his brother Barry, Neil Armstrong, Josh Read and Ian Warren twice each, with single victories claimed by Sean Gill and Rhett Watson.

Class action on the cards for British Clubmen

Four clubman crews from the UK will complete the line-up in SuperModified 1 and Modified 2 for Sol RB22. Although this will be his first Sol Rally Barbados, Ian ‘Pip’ Coulson and his Talbot Sunbeam have won their class in the Barbados Historic Rally which he has contested four times. The three-time Northern Historic Championship class-winner said: “After coming out to watch Sol RB19, I just knew I had to enter!” His 2002 Ford Focus, one of nine built to this spec by M-Sport, will run in M2, sponsored by JD Haynes Car Sales, co-driver Jonathan’s business.

Both driver and co-driver have been regular visitors, Haynes since the early 2000s. Having been 20 times on holiday, he started spectating at Sol RB, then helping Graham Haigh, who lives nearby in Yorkshire, on the event. Haynes got engaged to wife Joanne in the island, while Coulson and Pauline were married there.

Haigh first entered his Haigh & Sons/Tanfield Engineering Service Ford Escort MkII in RB18, returning the following year. With long-standing co-driver Kari Bates and the car in striking British Airways livery, they finished the event on both occasions. They contested the inaugural East Riding Stages closed-road rally in Yorkshire in February, Bates remarking that one of the stages reminded her of Padmore Village in St Philip!

For North Lincolnshire couple Marcel Freling and Karen Robinson, Sol RB22 will be only their second rally in the Honda VTec-powered MG ZR in which they finished third in SuperModified 1 in RB18 and only their third event since RB16, the first trip they made to compete in the island. Freling’s competition history dates back to 1992, initially in a Suzuki Swift Gti, before taking a break and returning in 2002 in the BTRDA 1400 Championship with a Nissan Micra. Over the next six years, with Robinson as co-driver, the couple won Class A5 three times and finished second twice, with Robinson the Overall Lady Co-driver Champion four times.

Conversely, Liverpool Civil Engineering Consultant John Carroll has been very active in the Honda Civic Type-R in which he has finished third and fourth in Modified 2 on his previous two visits in 2018 & '19. Having first rallied an Opel Manta in the 1980s, he returned after a long lay-off concentrating in 2016 in the Motorsport News MSVR Circuit Rally Championship. He is reunited this year with Kareem Gaskin, co-driver in Sol RB18.

Sol Rally Barbados and First Citizens King of the Hill are organised by the Barbados Rally Club, which celebrates its 65th Anniversary in 2022; Sol RB22 marks the 15th year of title sponsorship by the Sol Group, the Caribbean’s largest independent oil company.

ENTRIES FLOW IN FOR SOL RALLY BARBADOS 2022

Posted: January 11, 2022 12:02 PM

Nearly 40 entries have been posted for Sol Rally Barbados 2022 since the on-line entry form went live last Monday (January 3). While two-thirds of those are from overseas, the Barbados Rally Club (BRC) is buoyed by the positive response from island competitors looking forward to some measure of normality returning to motor sport, led by Roger Hill, whose record of 22 top 10 finishes on the club’s premier event is unrivalled.

Rally Club PRO Neil Barnard says: “The response during the first week has been hugely encouraging, particularly from local competitors looking forward to rallying once again. While we still have some way to go with getting our strategic plan for running the events in a Covid-safe environment complete and approved by the authorities, we are pressing ahead at full speed, allowing our loyal visitors from the wider Caribbean and further afield to make their preparations.” Sol RB22 is scheduled for the weekend of June 4 & 5, with King of the Hill on the previous Sunday (May 29).

Hill, who now campaigns a Skoda Fabia R5, was the first island driver to post his entry. He said: “We must be grateful to the clubs and permission given from the authorities for allowing events at Bushy Park and Vaucluse during our much-reduced 2021 season. Even though it may not have been the choice of some, it provided the opportunity for competitors to get out there and compete against the usual high level of competition under our Covid protocols. “But I am very excited about 2022, with the hope that road closures will resume. Whichever way we can get them - long, short, twisty, bumpy, wet or dry, we all want nothing more. The feeling of participating in a rally with cumulative times and various road conditions is something that we all miss greatly. The challenge of every corner and surface being different is what rallying is all about.”

Crowd favourite Andrew Jones, who won the BRC 2wd Championship in 2020 in his Ford Escort MkII, said: “Since I started rallying in 1992, I had never missed a season until for the first time in 2021, when there was no road rallying due to Covid. My wife and ‘navi’ Lindsey and I are eager to get back on the stages for 2022 - we miss seeing all the spectators lining the sides of the roads enjoying themselves while supporting their favourite drivers. We can’t wait to be entering the Duck Pond 90s sideways, going flat through the Esses at Malvern or tearing it up from Four Hills to Orange Hill, just to name a few of our brilliant stages.”

Like Hill, four-time Sol RB class-winner Jamal Brathwaite is grateful for the events that did run in 2021, but is looking forward to a return to closed road stages this year: “The BRC, MCBI and VRMSC ensured that the drivers were able to get seat time in 2021 and for that I am thankful. However, rallying on closed roads and with spectators watching offers more enjoyment. The stages are longer, there is a larger variety of corners and of course the speeds are a lot higher. The excitement on spectators’ faces, glimpsing them cheering along the stages and watching them get anxious as you don’t get on the brakes as early as they expect are all aspects of rallying that were missed in 2021. Also, these stages would allow our sponsors to get much-needed visibility in return for their continued support during these trying times.

“Sol Rally Barbados and King of the Hill will be exciting for 2022, as there are said to be new and exciting stages for us to contest over the two weekends. The car is all prepped and tested and we are ready for long awaited start of the 2022 season.”

Sol Rally Barbados is a tarmac rally, with around 20 special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport, Works & Maintenance; the previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.

Sol Rally Barbados and King of the Hill are organised by the Barbados Rally Club, which celebrates its 65th Anniversary in 2022; Sol RB22 marks the 15th year of title sponsorship by the Sol Group, the Caribbean’s largest independent oil company.

ENTRIES OPEN FOR SOL RALLY BARBADOS 2022

Posted: December 31, 2021 3:33 PM

On-line entries for Sol Rally Barbados 2022 will open next Monday (January 3) on the official web site, rallybarbados.net. The Barbados Rally Club (BRC) has confirmed that Sol RB22 is scheduled for the weekend of June 4 & 5, with King of the Hill on the previous Sunday (May 29), these dates subject to approval of the Club’s strategic plan for running the events in a Covid-safe environment if the pandemic continues.

Rally Club PRO Neil Barnard said: “We have been working hard behind the scenes in recent months on an extensive plan to enable us to run the event in as safe and controlled a manner as possible, bearing in mind that the pandemic is still with us. We are preparing a plan in consultation with the Barbados Motoring Federation to submit to the Covid-19 Monitoring Unit detailing what we have developed for managing everything from the interaction between competitors and our volunteer officials to the necessary protocols for safety in designed spectator areas where required. It’s important to note that we manage a sport in which the competition element takes place outdoors and spectator attendance occurs in naturally ‘socially distanced’ environments.

“We have looked carefully at the route and have identified a number of areas we can modify to make some of these requirements easier to manage, but the importance of maintaining a challenging event for our competitors has not been forgotten. In fact, I think some of the changes we’re being forced to consider will add to that challenge and certainly appeal to our competitors, from home and overseas.

“It was great to see the Barbados Turf Club welcoming spectators back to the Garrison on Boxing Day under strict protocols and we have been in touch with organisers of other sporting events as we work on our own plans. As we move into 2022, we need to look forward positively, so now is the time to open entries and start to gauge what level of participation we can expect.”

The announcement comes as a number of regular UK competitors in the BRC’s blue riband event have been on holiday in the island, taking advantage of the ease in travel protocols on both sides of the Atlantic to renew friendships with local families which started over the years through their common interest in rallying. Those visiting in recent weeks have included co-driver Steve McNulty, on honeymoon with wife Derrie, Andrew and Melissa Costin-Hurley, who got engaged on a west coast catamaran outing back in 2003, and Chris Shooter with partner Bev LeGood, marking their second Christmas and New Year in the island.

Those who haven’t managed a holiday have been keeping their hand in with events back home; indeed McNulty managed both, fitting in one last rally for the year, sitting with Rob Swann in his recently-acquired Ford Fiesta Rally2 in the Mini Tempest Rushmoor Stages on Tuesday (December 28). After a spin on SS2 left them 19secs down, a late charge saw them finish second, 7secs off victory, sharing the stage wins equally with eventual winners Richard Weaver and Jonathan Barrett in their Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI.

Sol Rally Barbados is a tarmac rally, with around 20 special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport, Works & Maintenance; the previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.

Sol Rally Barbados and King of the Hill are organised by the Barbados Rally Club, which celebrates its 65th Anniversary in 2022; Sol RB22 marks the 15th year of title sponsorship by the Sol Group, the Caribbean’s largest independent oil company.

Event Website / Details

Posted: December 31, 2021 3:33 PM

Rally Barbados