Behind the Scenes in the WRC - Rally New Zealand

The Inside Line's Rachel Cavers reports from Down Under about what she got up to behind the scenes at the fifth round of the FIA World Rally Championship, Rally New Zealand.

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

I’m back at M-Sport HQ in Cumbria trying to catch my breath after another busy WRC round.

This was my second rally working as the press officer for M-Sport and I’d never been New Zealand before, so I was really excited about going. I’d really enjoyed my first rally event in Turkey two weeks earlier but our 72-hour jaunt home through Europe in a bus had been far from easy – the 30 hour trip to New Zealand would be a walk in the park in comparison!

We left Manchester airport on a new A380 on the Saturday evening and had a three hour stop in scorching Dubai, before embarking on a second 14-hour stint to Sydney where we stopped again to refuel.  We had a couple of hours in Sydney before getting back on the plane for a four-hour flight over to Auckland, touching down just after midday on the Monday afternoon.  Some of the rally drivers were taking part in some PR activities in Auckland on the Monday but I was delayed and missed seeing some of our team, including Scott Martin, do a bungee from Auckland Harbour Bridge.  Scott had told me the week before we’d left that he was petrified of heights, so we were all really impressed that he went through with it.  Apparently Sebastien Loeb, who is a former gymnast, was pulling some impressive acrobatic moves mid-jump - which would have been interesting to see!

This year’s rally had moved to Auckland after being previously held in Hamilton.   I can’t compare it to the previous base in Hamilton, but Auckland seemed like the perfect place to host the event – it’s the country’s biggest city so there’s a lot going on and the location meant that the rally could move to a series of stages based both north and south of the island. We stayed at the Rally HQ, Sky City, which was based right next to the Sky Tower – the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere.  The entire M-Sport team were staying in the hotel along with most of the WRC drivers, and with service park only a ten minute walk alongside a host of nice restaurants to eat out in it was ideally situated.

When we travel for long-haul events we’re given some time off during the first couple of days to acclimatise to the new time zone, so I was lucky enough to catch up with my brother and an old friend who were both over in New Zealand which was great. I went up Sky Tower too, and even though it was late autumn and it wasn’t very warm we had really clear days so the views from the top of the tower looking over the city were sensational. 

We held the Ford Happy Hour media function in the Sky Bar on the Wednesday evening and some of the drivers got a chance to play blackjack and roulette. The hotel had a huge Vegas-style casino and Matthew Wilson told me he’d won nearly $300 last time he was over for 2008’s Rally New Zealand, but Henning Solberg wasn’t so lucky.  He kept everyone entertained at the roulette table as he didn’t have a clue what he was doing and kept betting everything on black – and lost every time!

On the Thursday we had another PR activity planned which required our service crews to build a raft out of anything they could find in their service area and race each other in Auckland’s Harbour.  As soon as it was revealed that there were alcoholic prizes the boys naturally turned very competitive, and Petter Solberg’s PR manager informed me that their service crew had been discussing tactics all week!  There was a bit of controversy when their raft was revealed on Thursday afternoon and it had a motor on the back, but  it was a great turn out and there were huge cheers from the crowd when the motor on Solberg’s raft failed to start! After the race, we had the ceremonial start and drivers autograph signing session down at the harbour side – there were thousands of fans there so it was a brilliant start to the rally.

This year’s Rally New Zealand was the longest competitive distance on an event since 2004, so it made for lots of early starts and trips to remote service areas each day.  On the first day, we drove up to a remote service two hours north of Auckland, in Whangerai.  It’s important to get a chance to speak to the drivers at the lunchtime service in order to get a feel for what needs to be written about in the end of day releases, but it also meant that I got to see a bit more of New Zealand.  It was an action-packed first morning as Matthew Wilson’s door window shattered mid-stage and dust from the roads had been spilling into his car – this made it really difficult for Matt to see where he was going and when he pulled into service both he and Scott were covered head to toe in dust! The team thought they might be forced to retire but luckily they sourced a spare window from a road-going Ford Focus, and Matt’s mechanics did a good job of fitting the new window in the short lunchtime service. 

On Saturday, North One TV wanted to do a feature with Matthew at the remote service so I travelled one hour south with the crew to Hampton Downs, an impressive international motor race circuit which has just recently been built.  The TV crew fitted a helmet camera on Matt’s engineer, Mark Lowe, and were able to get some really good footage of what goes on during a short 15 minute service.  One of the highlights from the Rally New Zealand, however, happened on the drive back to Auckland from remote service and we passed some luminous pink sheep! Everyone was fascinated by them and felt it was necessary to stop and take some pictures, definitely a good PR stunt if ever I saw one!

I decided to base myself in the manufacturers' media room for the last day of the rally as the remote service in Raglan was a four-hour round trip and would have left little time to write up the final event reports.  It turned out to be a really exciting day though and I was at the edge of my seat listening to all the latest updates from Becs and Colin who host the live World Rally Radio show.  There were only seconds between the top three drivers nobody could have predicted that Petter Solberg would hit a telegraph pole while leading and be forced to retire during the final stage.  BP Ford Abu Dhabi’s Jari-Matti Latvala ended up winning in what was the third-closest WRC finish ever, so there was a brilliant atmosphere down at the Ford service area when I went down to speak to the drivers later on.  Malcolm Wilson, the Ford team principal and M-Sport managing director, was delighted as it marked Ford’s 75^th WRC victory.  He even put his credit card behind the bar for team on Sunday evening’s closing party so there was a big celebration...and lots of sore heads the next day for the long plane journey back home!

Now it’s another busy week back at the office preparing for what will be an extremely busy WRC round in Portugal at the end of the month.  M-Sport will be running six Ford Focus RS WRC cars, five Ford Fiesta S2000 cars and there will also be eight Ford Fiesta R2 models competing in the Fiesta Sporting Trophy International class. It's going to be flat out, just the way we like it!