In 2001 Richard Burns became the first Englishman to win the World Rally Championship. Victory came at the end of a hard-fought season that captured the public imagination like no other before. His battle for supremacy with the fiery Scot Colin McRae became the stuff of legend and when he lifted the trophy many commentators heralded the beginning of a new era for rallying. This was not to be. Four years to the day after being crowned champion, Burns died from a brain tumour. He was 34.
To celebrate his memory, Goodwood will play host to the Richard Burns Foundation — a new charity aimed at mobilising the rally community in support of people suddenly struck down by serious illness. The foundation will also include the Michael Park Fund, named in honour of Burns’s friend and fellow competitor who was killed in a crash during the Rally of Great Britain last September. This will lobby for improved standards in road safety.
Burns’s career cut a swathe through what was a golden age for rallying. In seven years he went from novice to the country’s youngest national champion. By 1998, at the wheel of a Mitsubishi Carisma GT, he had won his maiden World Rally Championship event on the treacherous Safari Rally in Kenya — a feat akin to a Formula One driver taking his first win at Monaco. The following two years he finished second in the overall standings.
Unlike his arch rival McRae, Burns’s driving was calm, calculated and cautious. Whereas the Scot would win or crash spectacularly, the Englishman relied on meticulous planning and a precise driving style.
Burns lost the title he won in 2001 the following year and it was during his attempt to regain it in 2003 that he blacked out while driving to the season finale in Cardiff and was diagnosed with a tumour. His death last year was overshadowed in much of the media by that of the footballer George Best. However, Top Gear devoted a programme to him and his friend Jeremy Clarkson spoke movingly of “Burnsy” at his memorial.
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Robert Reid, Burns’s co-driver and the man to whom Burns was captured on camera saying “You’re the best in the world” upon crossing the finish line to victory in 2001, is setting up the foundation, and says it is a fitting legacy. “Our intention is to keep the memory of Richard and Michael alive in a way which will hopefully benefit many other people,” he says. “Everybody knows their names, but I want them to remain associated with the real spirit of motor sport in five or 10 or even 20 years’ time.
“Richard was one of my best mates, not just in motor sport, and to lose the two of them so close together really brought me up short. It wasn’t in my life plan to be organising a memorial to two such good friends. There’s something of a Peter Pan syndrome in motor sport; you know bad things can happen, but you never feel they’re going to happen to you, in or out of the car. What happened to Michael and Richard was a reminder that no one is invulnerable.”
The turnout to support the new foundation at Goodwood is expected to be huge. This year there is no World Rally Championship date to clash with the festival, which means the top teams, including Ford M-Sport, Subaru, Skoda and Peugeot are all expected to attend.
In addition to current championship cars, there will be around 30 from the history of rallying in action throughout all three days of the event. Hannu Mikkola, widely regarded as one of the greatest drivers of them all, will be reunited with an Audi Quattro A2, while other great names of rallying will be back in cars they know well. Sandro Munari, the Italian who scored a Monte Carlo rally hat-trick in the 1970s, will be in action in his Lancia Stratos and Sweden’s Bjorn Waldegaard — rallying’s first-ever world champion — in a Toyota Celica GT4.
The track has been expanded too. Last year was the first time spectators could watch the rally cars driven in anger, but the design meant the cars had to complete their run then return along the same route. This year the off-road course has been expanded into a full circuit to give spectators a close-up view of the action.
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Watch out for former world champions Colin McRae, Petter Solberg and Marcus Grönholm. The rising British star 19-year-old Matthew Wilson is also expected to be making an appearance at the festival, driving his M-Sport Ford Focus.
Goodwood hopes the expanded course and the record car and driver line-up will cement its position as a key date in the World Rally Championship calendar. While the festival is destined to be most keenly associated with the more glamorous
F1 race teams and the nostalgia of seeing past glories roar up the Goodwood hill, the growing importance of rallying is hard to ignore.
It is a change of which Richard Burns would no doubt approve.