Up and down the land, Wellington boots and bobble hats sit dormant for yet another year. It’s been this way since 2019. What has happened to Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship?

For almost 50 years, autumn meant one thing to motor sport fans: mud. Glorious mud. Granted, for the last two decades of its existence, Britain’s biggest rally had its wings clipped. The nomadic element of the RAC Rally was long gone. Much-loved events starting from London Airport (now known as Heathrow), heading north on a round-Britain route across five days and through three nights, fuelled by four star and amphetamines, went out of fashion in the 1980s.

A decade on and a rally’s right to roam was largely done thanks to David Richards’ cloverleaf format. Owning the WRC media rights, DR saw a more ‘paddock-based’ future for the sport. Events would be rooted in one place with a more formulaic approach, offering three days of rallying with twice-daily visits to a service park featuring canapés and quiche alongside gearboxes and sledgehammers. It worked. Manufacturers flocked. For a while.

The 1995 event was the last full-tour RAC. For the last three years of the millennium, Cheltenham hosted a rally which dropped the long-haul to Yorkshire, Kielder and the Borders in favour of Sunday spectator stages in the English Midlands followed by two days in Wales.

In 2000, Britain’s round of the world championship moved west of Offa’s Dyke and remained in Wales for the next 19 years with the location cemented in 2003, when the Welsh government took over from Network Q as title sponsor.

It wasn’t long before disharmony grew. In 2000, 150 crews started the event – more than any other rally on that year’s world championship calendar. By 2012, that number had slumped to just 31 crews on the international entry list. An all-time low.

Fans, too, had voted with their feet with dwindling numbers attending an event which once boasted (admittedly with little science behind the data) spectators measured by the million. Increasing indifference from the watching public could be traced back to that Cardiff-based 2000 edition heralding an all-ticket policy.

“Well-funded rounds in Saudi Arabia, Spain and Paraguay complicates a potential return”

Not only was the rally no longer roaming, but fans were no longer allowed to roam. The need to contain the paying public in a more controlled environment while they watched rally cars thunder through the trees just feet in front of them was entirely understandable. Rally fans are, however, an itinerant bunch who happily spend hours poring over maps plotting their way in and out of the woods. It wasn’t, it seems, so much the fact they had to pay, it was more that they were no longer permitted to go their own way that irked them.

Cardiff wasn’t without its complications. Understandably, the country’s biggest city and home of the Welsh parliament was the perfect place to base a more commercially driven WRC round. But that didn’t bring the forest stages any closer and it didn’t mask the fact that the capital is not really a rally town.

It took more than a decade – and coming within a whisker of losing Welsh investment – for the move north to arrive. Being based out of Deeside, over the border from Chester and more latterly Llandudno, helped rekindle some of the magic. Much of that magic came from the likes of Andrew Kellitt, the event’s route co-ordinator since 1989. Despite having an arm tied behind his back by that cloverleaf format, Kellitt delivered consistent innovation and challenge to the event.

He succeeded. Standing watching Elfyn Evans celebrate his 2017 Rally GB win with a perfect set of doughnuts outside Marks & Spencer in the middle of Llandudno was a moment the thousands of fans lining the streets would never forget. It was up there with Colin McRae’s world title celebrations in Chester, 1995, and those of Richard Burns six years on. Evans and his Northern Irish rival Kris Meeke were certainly doing their bit to rekindle the appreciation for homegrown heroes, but living up to that McRae-Burns relationship was challenging.

But as the 20th anniversary of Welsh investment in Britain’s WRC round loomed, so enthusiasm from Cardiff dwindled. Wales profited from its financing of the autumnal forest fight, but rallying was falling from political favour. The loss of key supporters like Gwilym Evans, who retired as the Welsh government’s head of major events in 2019, didn’t help. His successor was a golfer.

While there was a contract in place between Motorsport UK and the government, provision was made within that agreement for the event to move outside Wales if other funding could be sourced. The writing was on the wall. And it was no longer in Welsh.

Then came Covid and first minister Mark Drakeford’s announcement that no major events would be running in 2020. Rally GB was cancelled. Initial hopes of rolling funding over into 2021 were quickly dismissed by Cardiff. And that was largely that.

With barely a whimper, let alone a bang, Britain’s WRC round was gone.

Northern Irish politician Ian Paisley Jr and former WRC co-driver Bobby Willis worked tirelessly to bring the WRC to Belfast. They came close, but the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly complicated the funding process and left plans high and dry.

Will Britain ever host a WRC round again? It’s a question Elfyn Evans has asked himself on more than one occasion. He’s not sure. The Welshman told Motor Sport: “It’s incredible to think we’ve been without a WRC round for five years now. Will it come back? I don’t know. It’s hard when we have other countries coming in with plenty of money and enthusiasm behind them.”

The arrival of well-funded rounds in Saudi Arabia, Spain and Paraguay complicates a potential return, but WRC Promoter has always been clear that it would listen to the argument for a return to a rally heartland.

Motorsport UK CEO Hugh Chambers is growing in confidence for a return. His team is in the middle of a three-month feasibility study to take the event to Scotland in 2026.

“In terms of direction of travel,” Chambers said, “we’re in a good position and we’ve got good momentum. The focus of our attention is Scotland, but as with all these things in creating major sporting events, you’re never there until it’s done.”

The WRC is itself in a regulatory transition period. With two more years of hybrid Rally1 cars remaining, the FIA is set to greenlight a wider ruleset for ’27, where sustainably fuelled ICE, hydrogen, hybrid and even full EV would be welcome. Time will tell if that will be enough to raise manufacturer interest beyond the current three: Toyota, Hyundai and Ford’s satellite factory squad run by M-Sport.

There’s also the question of visibility. British and world rallying arguably remains some distance from McRae and Burns-inspired highs of the mid-1990s to early ’00s. Conversely, the sport’s speed and spectacle – courtesy of hybrid-boosted 530bhp Rally1 cars – has never been more impressive.

Scotland, a sensible set of manufacturer-appealing rules, a British world champion and a return to the stages with a dazzling display of between-the-trees heroism might seem like a big ask, but it’s not out of the question.

And there’s no shortage of wellies and woolly hats to be worn for the right answer.