Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2026 at 10:03pm
Standing outside Aberdeen’s P&J Live, David Richards smiled at the memory of his first visit to Scotland’s north-east. Much has changed since he finished fourth with Tony Pond aboard a Triumph Dolomite Sprint on the 1976 Granite City Rally.
But on a blustery, early Spring Monday, just off the A96, it was hard to imagine a change bigger than the one DR had just pulled off.
As the architect of era-defining success for Subaru, the mentor of rallying’s most recognizable name in Colin McRae, the innovator who delivered a digital WRC and, of course, as a world champion himself, losing his home round of the World Rally Championship was a significant fail.
When the manufacturers packed up and departed the North Wales coast on Sunday October 6, 2019, there was a question mark over Britain’s WRC future. But nobody would have foreseen the eight-year gap which followed. For all its heritage, for all the stories of Colonel Loughborough’s victory on the original 1932 event; for all its history as a founding round of the World Rally Championship and the titles Britain’s forest roads had directed and dictated, it was cast out for almost a decade.
