The Barbados Rally Club (BRC) has changed the dates of next year’s 33rd edition of its premier event to avoid a direct clash with a number of international rallies including rounds of the World Rally Championship and Motorsport UK British Rally Championship. Rally Barbados 2023 will now run on June 10/11, with the Rally Show and King of the Hill the weekend before; on-line entries will open on rallybarbados.net on Sunday (December 11) at 12.00pm UK time/08.00am Barbados time.
In a statement to competitors the organisers said: “When we announced the dates for Rally Barbados 2023 at the end of October, our understanding of what the World Rally Championship calendar would look like led us to believe that there would be no direct clash. When the dates for the 2023 WRC were published 10 days ago, however, we found RB23 head-to-head with Rally Italia Sardegna, while King of the Hill was already on the same weekend as the popular Jim Clark Rally in the UK.
“While clashes with the WRC are not new, it is important to the Barbados Rally Club and to the event to avoid one this year. After losing RB21 to the pandemic, we initiated some exciting new relationships this year, which we and our tourism partners are keen to build on in 2023 to widen global coverage and ensure the sustainability of the event, a plan which would be badly impacted by a clash with either the WRC or the ERC. As a result, after consultation with the BMF and other clubs in the region whose dates will be affected, Rally Barbados has been moved back one week. Bringing the event forward was not an option as that would have created issues with the window for shipping, as far as UK events is concerned.”
The statement, which has also been issued to the BRC’s overseas competitor base, concludes: “We appreciate that some of you may already have made plans based on the original dates and apologise for the change but hope that this announcement comes early enough to avoid too much stress when changing any flight and hotel bookings.”
Since the BRC, which marked its 65th Anniversary in 2022, ran the International All-Stage Rally in 1990, the event has grown into the Caribbean’s biggest annual motor sport International and a key National Event on the island’s sports-tourism calendar. It has regularly contributed more than Bds $4 million to the economy, much of it in valuable foreign exchange, and accounted for as many as 4,000 visitor nights at a traditionally quiet time of the year for tourism. The event has hosted in excess of 600 competitors from 32 countries, many of whom have returned time and time again.
Rally Barbados is a tarmac rally, with around 20 special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport, Works & Water Resources; the previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.
