British & Irish Championships 2024

[Steve Boyd]

Well I think for once the new BRC season has lived up to the hype - we couldn’t reasonably expect much better than a former ERC champion and last year’s JWRC champion, among other high calibre entrants.

And everybody seemed happy enough doing 100 forestry kilometres last weekend so it might not be out of the realms of possibility that next year or the year after there could be at least one 2-day BRC gravel round. As this year has already proved doing more than 70km clubman rallies was always plausible, just so long as there was good promotional benefit in the BRC for the competitors to be interested

Happy doing 100km for the entry fee of a 70km event. The organisers added 30km for free to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event. Would there have been as many entries if the full entry fee had been charged?

[HKSjbg]

Happy doing 100km for the entry fee of a 70km event. The organisers added 30km for free to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event. Would there have been as many entries if the full entry fee had been charged?

If it’s all down to the entry fee then surely it is sustainable to keep it at 100ish km? One would assume the organisers would be making a loss by not increasing the entry fee, yet this year’s event had 180 entries compared to 119 last year and 139 the year before.

I would also assume that although getting more entry fees coming in, that with 140 finishers there is a bit of an increase in the cost of repairing the roads. But still, with 61 more entries than last that would cover a lot of the extra cost involved in this year’s running of the event?

[J4MIE]

If it’s all down to the entry fee then surely it is sustainable to keep it at 100ish km? One would assume the organisers would be making a loss by not increasing the entry fee, yet this year’s event had 180 entries compared to 119 last year and 139 the year before.

I would also assume that although getting more entry fees coming in, that with 140 finishers there is a bit of an increase in the cost of repairing the roads. But still, with 61 more entries than last that would cover a lot of the extra cost involved in this year’s running of the event?

It’s not quite as simple as that. It was a round of all of the top UK championships, that’s the main reason entries were so high. Remember that BRC chops and changed their calendar on a whim the last few years.


Extra first usage costs - not sure of the figure, maybe £900/mile?
Extra 2nd usage costs - again maybe £650/mike or something?
Recce is an extra cost.
Extra permit fees per car is maybe a few hundred extra?

But then you have extra costs like rescue crews, doctors, signage, fuel/car costs for officials, etc.

If it was sustainable, every event would be doing it. All the details I’ve seen was saying it was specific to being the 50th year of the event. I can’t see it being much option in the future or other events, most will make a very modest small profit which will need to tide them over in leaner years.