The slow road to the fast lane

THERE is a vast forest wilderness in the border country between England and Scotland — roughly half way between Hexham and Hawick — known as the Kielder complex and in rallying terms this bleak, barren unforgiving landscape is as central to the mythology of the sport as Monaco is to Grand Prix racing.

It is here where reputations are made or shattered. 'Killer Kielder' or 'Kielder Bites' are two of the career obituary titles awaiting any driver who has come to grief on the impossibly fast forest tracks which criss-cross this massive wilderness.

As an integral part of the British round of the World Rally Championship event, Kielder has often decided the champion and it is a place where even the Finnish driver Markku Alen's legendary 'maximum attack' policy was scaled back simply to secure survival.

Last March, Donegal's Shaun Gallagher won the Borders Rally, based in and around Kielder, by six seconds and his first competitive experience of this rallying hellhole opened his eyes to the sort of skill and courage he will have to bring to bear if his ambition of competing at World Rally Championship level is to be realised.

It is a place, he knows, "where you have to turn on the magic" if you are to survive and win there.

'Turning on the magic' for Gallagher means entering that zone where a driver has not only complete confidence in his own skills, but also complete confidence in the pace notes being read to him by navigator, Richard Ashley.

"Rallying there was a strange experience for me because I had to set the pace on unfamiliar territory because I was leading the championship and was therefore the first car on the road. It's a very tricky forest and a lot of guys have local knowledge. Because you're first on the road and you don't know what times people behind you are setting and it can be difficult to find the pace. So, if I have a spin or get a puncture, then on a one-day rally you might not have the time to claw back the ground you've lost. It's very important then to be able to turn on the magic when you need it. It's happened to me a few times where you are in second place or joint leader going into the last stage of a rally and you have to get into that danger zone you know you have to because you won't win otherwise.

"Richard is a bit older than me, but he's experienced and it's good having someone like that with you. In somewhere like Kielder, he can help a lot because he'll say 'be careful here, I rolled here in 97' or 'so and so went off here on the RAC in 98' things like that. He can warn you about tricky places. There are blind crests and big jumps where you don't know what's on the far side, but you drive to the notes and trust them.

"My notes grade the severity of corners from one to six one being easy and six being most difficult. So with plus or minus notations, I know exactly what speed I should be doing. The system gives us some 21 different types of bends, when you include calls for hairpins and square corners, and I know the limits for each of those. Places like Kielder are hard, but rallying in France the situation is different in that so many of the cars and drivers are equally matched, you have to be driving at eleven-tenths of your ability all the time to win. In any event over there any one of ten drivers might be capable of winning and even then the winner might only have an advantage of a tenth of a second at the end, so it's tough enough. It's unbelievable the things you'd be doing. You've a lot of mountain rallies over there and there's huge drops on some of the stages, so there's no room for error. You come around a corner and all you can see is absolutely nothing. You want a lot of confidence in yourself for that."

Confidence is obviously not something the 23-year-old Donegal man is lacking. He currently leads the British Peugeot 206 Supercup series, while he is second in both the French gravel and tarmac championships. Indeed, the Peugeot World Rally Championship team has taken him on board as a junior driver and he gets to travel to a number of WRC rounds to help the team in a variety of ways, not least of which is bringing sponsors for spins. It is a role that could develop in any number of ways and one which Shaun relishes simply because of the proximity it allows him to the top level.

"At this stage I never thought I'd be leading the British series and lying second in both championships in France and be leading junior as well, especially as I do not have the sort of local knowledge the French drivers have and that's a big advantage for them and a big disadvantage for me.

"It's a lot tougher for me on several fronts the heat conditions out there, driving a left hand drive car. But having said that it's going well and I'm getting noticed and that's very important in France where all the big manufacturers Citroen, Peugeot and Renault are all involved in motor sport and you want to be noticed by them.

"The plan is to get involved in the World Junior Championship and hopefully get picked up by a team and I'm quite confident of getting a test with one of them because I've been doing so well in the British and French championships. But you have a lot of good drivers there from all over the world from Britain, France, Belgium, Sweden and Finland, of course, where rallying is the national sport.

"Indeed, there's so much money in Finland, driver's managers can come to teams and bring a whole financial package with them and that's another big disadvantage to me. But you have to fight for anything in this world and that's what I'm doing."

About 600 miles south-east of the Kielder forest is the German city of Nurnberg home to the Norisring street circuit where Dubliner Michael Devaney finally cracked out a lights-to flag victory in the BMW Junior Formula. The 18-year-old races with the team run by former World Champion Keke Rosberg and the achievement was all the more remarkable as he had undertaken no testing due to the lateness of his move to Team Rosberg.

THOUGH he raced in the same series last year, it was with a different team and he was not allowed take information with him, in terms of race car set-up and tyre choices for different tracks.

"We were fifth in the championship last year and my dad (former racer Bernard) and myself decided I was still too young to move up through the grades and that I should try and get a better result in this championship. We came to Germany because there were so many drivers trying to break through in England and we wanted to do something different.

"On top of that the BMW series is a 'slicks and wings' series and in effect the cars are mini-F3 cars, so the experience of running a car on slick tyres with relatively complex aerodynamics, was going to stand to me later on. It has the same sort of grip levels as an F3 car, but it is less powerful. The series is run alongside the German DTM (touring car) championship, so all the big teams Mercedes, Audi, BMW, VW and Opel watch it very closely.

"I'm based in a town called Neustadt and I live close to the Rosberg team's race shop. I've been learning a lot from the team, they're very experienced, but we were hampered at the start of the year because of the ban on testing after the first race.

"But we've been improving race-by-race and we're slowly getting there. I've had to learn to work with my engineer Peter Seiber, who's worked with all the big names in German motorsport Schumacher and Frentzen among them and has huge experience. Having Keke there too is very good because he gives me a lot of good advice. He doesn't take any bullshit and he's been a great help.

"We were quick straight off at the Norisring and it helped that nobody had tested there and we found a good set up very quickly, so I managed to get pole position and won from the front. That showed we were making progress and we go back now to places like the Nurburgring, Hockenheim and so on, so we have the basic set-ups for those tracks and we can go well. I don't think that we'll catch the series leader Maxi Gotz, but we might be able to get second place and that would be good. I've a lot of options open and a lot of people are interested, so I'm not sure what I'll be doing next year, but if I could get on one of the manufacturers' junior programmes or something like the Red Bull junior programme that would be good. It's costing over €200,000 for this season and although we have some good long-term sponsors, finding the money is not easy. To have the backing of a big manufacturer would help.

"It would be nice to have a timetable to make the progression into F1, but you need to get the results first and you also need luck and to be in the right place at the right time. Every year I've been getting better and better and you just hope the progression continues."

From Kielder to Nurnberg, the progression for Shaun Gallagher and Michael Devaney has been continual and the backing from Motorsport Ireland has helped greatly. But these young men are well aware the level of progression has to continue and confidence levels have to remain high. Both are go-ahead characters who know what they have to do to reach the top and are prepared to make the sacrifices. They have the potential, now all they need is luck.