Behind the Scenes in the WRC - Rally Bulgaria

 

Blog post - by Rachel Cavers, Press Officer, The Inside Line.

 

Hi everyone,

The World Rally Championship summer break is well and truly over and now it’s full steam ahead for the busy second half of the season.

I’m just back from Rally Bulgaria – a new WRC round but logistically difficult from a PR point of view.  Normally when on rally, I’d base myself in the media centre during the day, tuning in to Rally Radio, watching the live split times and updating our websites and social networking sites with all the latest updates from the team.  When our cars return to service, I meet our drivers for quotes and then return to the peace and quiet of the media centre to write up the end of leg reports.

However, as the service park and the media centre for this event were 30km apart, I based myself at the Ford service area for the entire rally - otherwise I’d spend most of my day driving between service and Rally HQ and miss all the action!  The service park is a great place to be as there’s always a great buzz, but the internet connection was quite unreliable in Bulgaria and sometimes it’s hard to concentrate with so many people milling about.  That’s the nature of rallies – they’re unpredictable and you have to adapt as best you can.  No rally is ever the  same – I’ve learned that very quickly!

I work closely with the other Ford team press officers on event and during the last round in Portugal, we’d had a bit of brainstorm for PR activities to do with our drivers in Bulgaria.  We wanted to do something football related as the rally coincided with the World Cup final weekend, so we asked our teams to take part in a penalty shoot out.  I contacted Carlisle United Football Club (also sponsored by Stobart) prior to Bulgaria and they’d donated club strips for our team to wear.  Three media teams took part in the penalty shoot out too – and we had Mikko Hirvonen’s personal trainer, aptly known as ‘Tank’, as the goalie.  We were supposed to have the Bulgarian national team goalkeeper but unfortunately he had to cancel at the last minute.

North One TV ended up winning the shoot out and our guys finished third.  You’d never guess that Scott Martin, Matthew Wilson’s co-driver, is a regular player - he missed all three of his penalties.  I caught the footage on my Flip video camera and uploaded it to YouTube and the team Facebook site to humiliate Scott some more.  It was a really fun activity though and it provided Becs Williams from World Rally Radio with lots to talk about on air over the weekend.

We also had a new addition to the Stobart M-Sport Ford Rally Team in Bulgaria , Swedish driver P-G Andersson.  The FIA had requested his attendance at the official press conference prior to the rally so I accompanied P-G to the conference at Rally HQ on the Thursday afternoon.  P-G was sitting next to Petter Solberg and the former Formula One Champion, Kimi Raikkonen, who yawned as Becs from World Rally Radio asked him a question.  Everyone had a bit of a giggle when Becs asked Kimi if she was keeping him awake!  The press conferences are a great way for journalists to ask the drivers any questions they want in the run up to a rally and Becs does a great job of coaxing any interesting stories and opinions from the drivers. There was a fair bit of interest in what P-G had to say seeing as he was the new kid on the block, but he handled it all very well and made a good impression both on and off the stages.

 

After a delayed flight back from Sofia on Monday, I got back to the office yesterday and have been busy writing copy for our new M-Sport website which is due to go live at the end of the month.  I’m also starting to prepare for what will be an extremely busy round in Finland in two weeks time.  It’s the biggest entry list of the WRC season so far with over 120 cars - so it’s going to be hectic.

I’ll update you with how everything went once I’m back.