One year ago, we began our review of the 1975 RAC Rally with a discourse about the tremendous following which the sport of rallying has in Britain and the vast crowds of spectators who go out into cold, damp, foggy, frosty, November nights to watch that event pass through remote forests. We spoke of the change in the nature of these spectators, of how at one time they were invariably enthusiasts who knew about map references, approach directions, white road goers and roadbook diagrams, and of how the sport’s popularity has so increased that nowadays the crowds are made up of all manner of people, most with no inside knowledge of the sport and who go along for the excitement just as those who have never clipped on a pair of skis might watch the Winter Olympics.
We now find ourselves tempted to begin this review of the 1976 rally in a similar ways though not in the sensationalist style employed by some of the non-sporting press.
There was a time when all spectators were hardy, knowledgeable. enthusiasts. They could be trusted not to get mixed up with rally traffic, not to cause unnecessary congestion on narrow roads leading to forests, to park their cars sensibly and, perhaps most important, to take up vantage points within the forests in places well out of range of cars which might leave the road suddenly and at pretty high speed.
In those days the locations of the special stages were not kept secret. A day or two before the rally they were available to all, and the spectating public were able, quite unintentionally of course, to scatter themselves all over the country without being concentrated in any one stage in particular.
But as the event’s popularity grew, the organisers began to worry more and more about stage access roads being blocked by spectator traffic. Eventually they began to keep stage locations secret, the idea being to confine spectators to those stages where there was ample parking facilities and enough access roads to prevent competitors becoming snarled up with spectators.
This secrecy is a practice which we have always been against, for it always presents a challenge and one invariably gets groups of spectators driving around looking for the secret stages and often getting in the way. There are those enthusiasts, of course, who know where to go anyway. Far better for all concerned would be a completely open route with precise instructions on how to get to the various points and specific information concerning the places where access would be almost impossible. All too often Belgrave Square remains clammed up, and this is just one instance of how that attitude has adverse effects.
The object of the secrecy was to prevent congestion, but it also had a result which was not foreseen as something potentially dangerous, but which has shown up as a great risk indeed. As crowds became bigger, the proportion of non-enthusiast watchers with little or no inside knowledge of the sport increased accordingly. To a competitor this became more noticeable rally after rally, for no longer were the spectators lining the forest tracks confining themselves to safe vantage points behind the tree lines. They began standing on the outside of bends, in the middle of firebreaks which served as natural escape roads, on log piles which can so easily erupt almost explosively even if just brushed by a tailswinging car, in ditches which are often used for extra camber and even on the very edges of the tracks themselves. No longer were these watchers prepared for the sudden commotion caused by a car leaving the road and performing all manner of unexpected acrobatics before coming to rest. They didn’t have the survival instinct of the enthusiast and were positioning themselves in places which could only be described as suicidal.
As the popularity of the RAC Rally increased, so these things would have happened anyway, but they were accelerated without doubt by the policy of secrecy adopted by the rally organisers, albeit without their realising it of course. Send a million spectators to watch fifty special stages and in theory you need have no more than 20,000 at each stage. But keep all but ten of those stages secret and you at once create artificial concentrations which will produce crowds of 100,000 at the disclosed stages. Bear in mind that a substantial proportion of those crowds will know little about the sport and you will see that the problem of crowd control becomes enormous.
During the RAC Rally the kind of incident which everyone fears actually happened. For a car to leave the road on a special stage is nothing, for it happens all the time and the crews at once set about getting back on to the road and carrying on. But this particular departure from the road took place on a corner at which spectators were standing in packed rows along both sides of the road, on the outside and inside of the corner, and occupying the only space available as an escape avenue. With no blame whatsoever attached to himself, the driver lost adhesion, slid outwards and went straight into the crowd, causing several people to be taken away for medical treatment and the stage to be held up and subsequently abandoned.
True to form, some newspapers and even radio and television made on outcry, the wood for the time being taking absolute precedence over the trees, and there were even questions in the House. Various ways of keeping spectators away from danger zones have been put forward, but we feel that if more stages were made public there would be less funnelling and subsequently crowds of lesser proportions in any one place. What should not be forgotten is that once a massive spectacle is created it is virtually impossible to keep people away from it, so it cannot be said that the vast crowds took anyone by surprise. Furthermore, is it not still a principle of law that people are assumed to have intended the natural consequences of their own acts? That would appear to create a two-pronged onus.
