HERO-ERA Rally for the Ages up for prestigious RAC Historic Award
Update - HERO-ERA were worthy winners of the Innovation category at the RAC Historic Motoring Awards!
HERO-ERA are an HCVA Founding Partner and are globally renowned for hosting competitive historic rallying events across the world including the famous Peking to Paris rally.
Their Rally for the Ages is an event with a difference as the rules dictate that the driver and co-driver must have a combined age of no more than 70. This encourages family teams with competitors as young as 11 years old, often taking part in their first rally event.
The ‘regularity’ event itself consists of a 100-mile open road route around the Oxfordshire countryside as well as four technical tests at Bicester. Regularity rallying is not technically about the fastest times across stages - each stage has a target average speed and competitors are penalised for every second that they arrive early or late to each checkpoint. This makes the rallies as much about good navigation and teamwork as about the driving!
2023 was the inaugural rally and was a tremendous success - fielding 90 historic cars with 180 keen competitors. The event is free to enter and focuses on introducing young people to regularity rallying and historic motorsport in an accessible way. Impressively 55% of entrants were new to rallying so they have certainly achieved this goal.
Our partners Starter Motor also had a strong attendance with five cars entered including the youngest overall team.
Images courtesy of Coryton
Rally for the Ages is all about looking towards the future too - 70 of the 90 competing cars ran on Sustain Classic Biofuel in order to minimise emissions during the event. It is hugely satisfying to see young people enjoying historic motorsport in an accessible and sustainable way as this chimes exactly with what the HCVA is all about. We’re excited to see the event continue to grow and develop into the future.
Introduced in 2019, the RAC Historic Awards are hosted by the Royal Automobile Club, Britain’s oldest and most influential motoring organisation. The Rally for the Ages event is nominated as a finalist in the ‘Innovation’ category along with the REVS Restore project and the Autocar Digital Archive.
Good luck to the guys at HERO ERA as well as all others nominated for awards!