North Humberside Stage Rally 

Cadwell Park

20 November 2022

The last event of the year at Cadwell Park has been promoted for the last few years as the Motor Sport News Rally Championship. Well not this year, Darren Spann the previous Championship Manager, said: “Due to the pressures and workload of the past three years, along with all the organising team’s personal work and family commitments, we have reluctantly agreed that now is the time to regroup, review, refocus and ultimately relaunch the Championship.

By all accounts the MSN championship will be back next year but in the meantime the individual rally clubs are continuing to organise their individual rallies like they did last year.

The Dukeries Motor Club Ltd are holding the Motorsport UK Championship Permit on behalf of the eight other clubs that are organising the stage rallies. These will be held at six different circuits around the UK and will now come under the banner of the MGJ Engineering Circuit Rally Championship.

So what has changed? Not a lot for the spectators who just come along for one round. There are still lots of cars heading the wrong way round the track, sliding up access roads and tearing up the paddock areas - standard for a circuit rally, which this is. 

And that in a nutshell is what circuit rallying is about; use the track and any other parts of the site to make up challenging stages. At Cadwell we had four stages which the drivers took on twice before moving onto the next one. So eight “races”, which considering there were 75 teams registered, and that’s a lot of rally cars whizzing past for your entrance money.

The previous year’s championship ran a seeding system with the fastest cars and teams coming out first which they replicated this year. To me it seemed like there were less high end full on rally cars, however there were some very quick teams down the running order.

The only reason they were seeded later was the fact that your Micra is not as powerful as your Ford Fiesta R5 and is going to be slower. Starting 30 seconds apart, a few of the cars did catch up with the racer higher up the list, announcing their desire to pass with blaring horns and flashing headlights. 

All of the teams did two laps of each stage, which I’m sure was challenging as the day progressed and the track conditions changed. The morning session was very cold and foggy with a very wet track.

But as is standard in the UK the fog cleared, the sun sort of came out then the low clouds rolled in. Then it got bright again and the track started to show a dry line but the temperature dropped as the sun headed west. All of the seasons in a few hours!

With eight stages, that amount of racing is going to take some time to complete but this is rallying so slapping on a set of big lights when the sun set was the order of the day.

The last two stages were held in the dark, and when I say dark it was pitch black in some parts of the track with only the mountain to the café having any sort significant light. My top tip, pack a torch as there are a lot of trip hazards around the track.

I did take a few pictures in the dark and had the intention to do some arty light trails photographs, but after ten hours trackside and an accident that was taking some time to clear on the last stage I decided it was time to head home.

This meant I missed the grand finale which was a fireworks display celebrating this the last event at Cadwell for this year. I'm sure the large crowd that had turned out for this event enjoyed it.

But it wasn’t just the rallying celebrating the last meeting of the year. There were a few merchandise stalls and a car club display area. The show car area in the past has been well worth a visit with some great classic rally cars on show. This year not so.

There were one or two interesting road cars although not many, but as it’s winter I would expect that most classic show cars are tucked away until better weather arrives in spring. It would have been nice to have the contrast of the classic rally cars on show. Maybe they will bring it back for next year.

The paddock was open as always at Cadwell, so there was plenty of opportunities to look round the cars as the teams worked on them. And if you had been good this year Santa was giving gifts out to the children, which was a nice touch and summed up the friendly family focused event. 

Thanks to David Gowshall for helping out with this report you can see more of his work by following this links.

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