Dukeries Rally Donington Park - 17 March 2024

The Dukeries Rally 2024 was held at Donington Park last Sunday in what can be only be called standard British weather conditions. In other words we had all four seasons in the matter of a few hours!

Arriving early for a change, we did a quick recce of the car park/field just outside of the main entrance to Donington Park and soon realised it was not going to work for parking cars. The whole field was heavily waterlogged, and a few cars that did venture “off road” soon started to bog down.

So, we drove a little further from the entrance to get a prime spot facing down hill and next to the gravel road. Click the images for more.

Walking to the entrance it was amusing in a morbid way to watch unfortunate drivers churning up the field and realising very quickly that the ground was very soft. They should have realised that with all of the rain we have had recently, off-roading was not a good idea especially as it was raining quite hard on arrival.

The organisers of the Dukeries Rally had anticipated that the usual scenario of the circuit rally championship was not going to work this weekend. It is standard practice for for the stages to use all of the available space for rallying, slip roads, grassed areas, runoff areas, access roads in fact no where is usually off limits to this form of rallying. 

However, looking at the three pairs of stage maps which made up the six stages it was obvious that for this meeting the cars would only be using tarmac. The ground was just too soft even for rally cars.

Did this diminish my enjoyment in regard to previous times I have been to this meeting? Yes and no is the none committal answer. The previous round held at Snetterton which was quite a bit drier had quite a large off road section resulting in me, as a spectator photographer, getting some rather good action pictures of the cars throwing mud into the air.

I would have liked to get some more of the same at Donington but I think the health and safety experts had had a word.

To be fair, they were correct and right to keep the rallying to the hard stuff this weekend. This was confirmed in an amusing if somewhat twisted way as I watched quite a lot of spectators slide down a few slopes near me. Donington is quite hilly.

The resulting slides did cover the unfortunate individuals with a ridiculous amount of mud, emphasising the tricky conditions under foot.

During the morning stages quite a few cars made unscheduled departures from the designated routes as the rain continued to fall. There were a lot of cars carrying battle scars by the end of stage four. These cars with damage were now easy to spot as the sun had made an appearance, banishing the gloom of the am hours to history. 

Also, it was somewhat strange that the temperature would go from quite cold to quite mild. As spectators all we had to contend with was should I take my jacket off?

The competitors had bigger fish to fry, they had to pick the correct tyres in a vain attempt to stay on the grey stuff and avoid the green stuff in conditions that were “tricky”.

Mastering the changeable track conditions and overall winners of the 64th Dukeries Rally was #1 Michael Igoe with Will Atkins in the Citroen C3 Rally 2. Igoe is a former British GT driver so is adept at the circuit aspect of the MGJ Engineering Circuit Rally Championship.

Last year’s champions #2 John Griffiths and Emma Morrison in the Ford Fiesta R5 came in second followed by #5 Daniel Bird and Nigel Barber also in a Ford Fiesta R5.

Throughout the different class racing last weekend there were great individual battles going on. At the previous round #8 Martin Hodgson and Tony Jones in the Ford Escort Mk2 and #9 James Garner and Jordan Joines in the Darrian GTR posted the same overall aggregate stage times in the two wheel class, showing how close the racing can be.

At Donington they were split by #10 Alasdair Stables and Neil Jones in the great looking Vauxhall Chevette HSR.

The winners of the other classes is as follows:

The next and final round of the MGJ Engineering Circuit Rally Championship will be at Cadwell Park on the 31 March. The Pistonclick team will be there to capture the action.

Photographic Post Script

The camera equipment I used on this assignment was a crop sensor Nikon D500 with a AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR and a 1.4 and 2.0 teleconverter. For the garage shots a AF-S DX NIkkor 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR was used with the D500.

My shooting buddy RPW Photography used the same setup but added the Nikon 300mm PF for the long shots.

David Harbey had the full frame Nikon D850 with the AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR.

Results from the Nikon D500 with a AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR and a 1.4 and 2.0 teleconverter are generally very good. However, there is one area in which this combination fails to produce good results - shooting through fences when you can’t get close to the fence.

The focal length of this crop sensor with teleconverters puts it in a similar length as a full frame camera, using for example the Nikon 200-500mm. The fence structure is much more visible when shooting from say 3m behind the fence with a crop sensor. Being 3m from the fence is not ideal in any circumstances but it can be done with a long focal length lens and the right lighting conditions.

The two images show this. In image 1 the lens hood is just touching the fence, and image two is 3m away from the fence. I managed to reduce the fence effect by using a slow shutter speed and panning. I also tried multiple locations, as getting the right angle to the fence is very important in reducing the “glint” from the sun off the fence. It appears that a lot of glass helps reduce the fence effect. 

All of my pictures used in this report have to be compressed to allow for hosting on the website and ease of loading on mobile devices. The following is my method of compressing an image.

Original image size 5568 x 3712px .jpg is 20.67mp.

After any crop and manipulation the DPI is reduced from 300 to 96 and exported at 1920 x 1280px at 90% jpg.

This results in an image of around 400-500kb which is easy for a mobile phone to download and display. It also gives good results on a home PC with a high definition screen.