You Have To Be Willing To Brave The Elements To Enjoy This

The Worst Sport To Watch In The World

Rallying: The Most Methodical Major Motorsport

It’s important to understand that rallying is possibly the most obsessively, methodically inane form of major auto racing. The face of it is that you take a regular road car, strip it, cage it for safety, modify it with insanely expensive suspension, custom all-wheel drive, and an extremely high-strung turbo engine. Then you race the car on real public roads, which rally organizers have closed for safety.

But the thing is that these cars don’t race against each other; they race against the clock. Cars run one by one, spaced out one, two, or even three minutes apart. The roads they race on, typically twisting forest logging tracks, are by necessity in the middle of nowhere. Most of the time the competing rally cars are simply driving from one section of closed road to another.

You need to invest the better part of an entire morning to see the field of cars pass you a single time.

You’d think nobody would even show up to watch. And yet, I kid you not, thousands upon thousands of people trekked out into the Welsh forests for this rally. Wales was not kind to them.

I remember standing on top of a dam, in 40-mile an hour winds that had long since torn my poncho in half, being pelted with stinging rain blowing up the face of the dam and directly into my face. I stood there for several hours waiting for the top drivers to pass. They were only in view for a few seconds at a time.

That was only a single morning on the trip. Watching a rally like this requires driving hundreds of miles criss-crossing Wales, from one remote forest to another. I (and everyone else I talked to following the rally, from locals to tourists coming in from all over Europe) was up early and home late. Too hot and too cold, never dry, stained with mud and exhausted. The tea was good, at least.

In and of itself, watching a rally is a horrible experience. It would easily put itself in the running for the worst sport to watch in the world, and that’s leaving the deaths aside.

(Jalopnik.com)