Ahead of this weekend’s World Rallycross Championship round at Lydden Hill, UK, CAR talks to Robert Reed, who organised the first ever rallycross event in 1967
Rallycross is the motorsport’s wild child: loose rules, argy-bargy and panel damage are the norm, in what’s a metal-to-metal fisticuffs fought over dirt, tar jumps and bumps.
The first FIA World Rallycross Championship is being contested in 2014, with Round Two on this Sunday, May 25, at Lydden Hill in the south of England. This is where it all began in January 1967, after television programmer, Bob Reed, needed something to screen when horse racing was cancelled. Here is how rallycross began.
How did the first event happen?
‘The idea came the December before. I was director of World of Sport: that was the Saturday afternoon program on ITV. And in the winter, one of the problems we had was the horse racing, which was the mainstay of the afternoon (everything was planned around the horseracing). If the weather was bad – fog, ice, snow – it could be cancelled at short notice. So what we had were a series of films – the Shell History of Motor Racing. Bill Mason made them, Nick Mason’s (from Pink Floyd) father. That used to be our standby…’
So you were into motor racing?
‘Motor racing was my sport – I looked after all of it [for ITV], not that there was much of it. In December [1966], we televised a hill climb from Yorkshire. It wasn’t a big event, and it was in very bad conditions: it was a frosty and slippery, and the cars could hardly get up the hill, because they’re obviously on more or less sprint tyres for hillclimbs. Then they had to come back through the paddock, over the top of the hill, and it was entirely mud, and they all slithered their way down – and at the end I thought, this is good fun; we could do more of this…’
What happened next?
‘The following week, I was thinking about it and I had a call from a guy from a motor trial club, who wanted us to televise a trial. I said no, but I’ve got this idea – come and have a beer. So we went to the pub, and I said look, I’ve got this idea – could you mount that instead? And he said, ‘Yeah, I think I could. We do our club racing at Lydden, and they’re just enlarging the circuit, and there’s a whole are which is unmade road’. I said, ‘That’s ideal’. We had a look, and as we went down the Dover Road, there were trucks dumping chalk – and we thought if we got a few lorry loads of that, it could look like snow.’
What about getting it through the RAC?
I approached John Sprinzel who used to do some commentating – John was a rally driver, race driver and journalist; and Barry Gill who used to cover all the motor racing for The Sun. They liked the idea, and I said to them: ‘It is really the Monte Carlo rally, but in an afternoon. And you’re not over thousands of miles with about 10 film units; you’re in one place with four cameras, you can see the whole thing. We start it and finish it… three races maybe, and a final – that’s it, and it’s all over”. John came up with the name ‘Rallycross’, went to the RAC, managed to talk them into it, and we went ahead with the first round.’
How did that first event go?
‘The first one was won by Vic Elford. He borrowed a Porsche 911 from the press department at Porsche in London. He said ‘I want to test it – I’m going down to Kent for the weekend.’ And I saw him after, and he said,’ How am I going to explain the cracked windscreen!?’. As we finished, the phone rang from [ITV] headquarters of sport, and they said, ‘That was great – can you do another one next week?’
What was so appealing about it?
‘It was the only sporting event that had been especially devised for television. It was ideal for television, because it was all contained, in an afternoon, in a matter of three hours, in a location and you could see the whole track with four cameras. Once it had been seen, and we were getting good ratings, the word got around very quickly and then the BBC decided to do it as well….’
And for the drivers?
‘It was relatively inexpensive to stage. Club drivers could afford it – if you had a decent rally car… or you had a bit of say with a works team you could do it, and there were no complicated rules – we kept it simple. It’s not like Formula One now: it was simple in rules and easy to understand even if you’d never seen a motor race before. And having got a lot of viewers who were expecting horse racing, we kind of had a built-in audience.’
You had Paddy Hopkirk for the second one?
‘John said, I know Paddy, he lives in London, just go around and knock on the door and ask him to come along. So I did. He came along in a works Mini, and by then it was established. That was how it was established’
How do you feel about rallycross as an FIA world championship?
‘Well about time! It’s taken a long while! It’s brilliant – I just hope we get the television coverage. The other thing is that motorsport is so much more universal; if you back to ’67, not all of the countries that are into motorsport now even had televisions! You’re talking about black and white television.
‘So, really, it’s the expanse of television and sport internationally, where now you expect to be able to watch a live football match from Brazil, maybe switch over to a live cricket from Australia, then onto a rally right up in the north of Sweden, all in one day. It’s now so universal – sport on television, and television itself, and of course motoring in general. I’m delighted.’