Scotland poised for WRC eventposted in RSCOT14 | 09 | 2010
SCOTLAND'S RALLY FANS have received a major incentive to support the second running of RallyScotland which starts on October 15: "Get behind the event and in five years Britain's round of the World Rally Championship could be roaring past you."
That was the pledge from Andrew Coe, chief executive of the Motor Sports Association, the governing body for motor sport in the UK, and International Motor Sports. IMS is the events management and commercial subsidiary of the MSA which handles the Formula One British Grand Prix at Silverstone, RallyGB, the current WRC round in Wales, and RallyScotland.
Coe's comment came as he spoke for the first time about the substantial losses — reportedly £400,000 — the inaugural RallyScotland, a round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC), suffered in 2009.
"Last year was tough for us and we've learned a lot of lessons from the experience," Coe, who will attend tomorrow's launch of the 2010 RallyScotland at Gleneagles Hotel — one of the event's sponsors — admitted.
"A lot of people see us as an external promoter who is making big money out of this; the reality is no one is making money. If there's a profit, it goes to the MSA and is then injected back into Scottish motor sport.
"The three major problems we had last year costs which were too high; our sponsorship levels didn't hit the mark and we didn't sell enough tickets for the rally stages.
"Last year we also implemented the same business model we have used successfully for RallyGB. The business model was wrong for Scotland, so we have approached RallyScotland differently this year.
"We've identified significant costs which have been cut, and on-event we've made savings by having one centralised service area for the cars.
"But without question our biggest challenge is convincing people to pay to see the rally in the stages and to get behind this event locally, so we're going after the hearts and minds of Scottish motorsport fans.
"We have dramatically reduced the cost of tickets for this year and made it easier and cheaper for rally fans to see more than one stage in a day. We're also the only IRC round this year to run Friday-Sunday.
"Half of last year's loss was down to the lack of ticket sales. We were miles away with our projections. We knew because RallyScotland was a new event sales would be slow, so we set ourselves the target of a quarter of what we achieve in Wales for RallyGB. The stark reality was we sold only a quarter of what we had hoped for."
That, allied to unforeseen significant costs — such as the £60,000 IMS had to spend on mobile offices and temporary metal roads after the location for the media office and rally HQ in Stirling had to be changed at the last minute — contributed to the major shortfall.
So too did the lack of major sponsorship, a problem which continues into this year. And while RallyScotland receives £300,000 from Scottish Government agencies, including VisitScotland and Event Scotland, the lack of a major sponsor is worrying.
"Through our partnership with Eurosport, RallyScotland is beamed live to millions of people across 70 countries," Coe explained. "That's a big market to place your product or company in front of."
But Coe is not only adamant the current three-year IRC deal, which expires at the end of the 2011 event, will be extended for another three years, he believes the infrastructure will then be ready to host Britain's WRC round from 2015.
"The Scottish Government is ambitious," he continued, "but leaping straight to world level would have been far too difficult a challenge to take from scratch, so the IRC was the perfect vehicle to deliver the major motorsport event we were asked to supply.
"In four years, 2014, Scotland has a major sporting year hosting both the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup. After that, there's nothing on the horizon. In our discussions, from 2015 onwards there is a strong and definite opportunity for Scotland to host the World Rally Championship event; no question."
Jim McGill