Jamaica’s Kyle Gregg, one of over 50 overseas drivers and co-drivers to compete in Rally Barbados last year.
The on-line entry form for Rally Barbados 2024 will go live next week on the official web site, rallybarbados.net, opening a six-month window to enter the Caribbean’s biggest annual motor sport International. RB24 will be the 34th edition of the Barbados Rally Club’s (BRC) premier event since the first International All-Stage Rally in 1990.
Subject to final ratification by the Barbados Motoring Federation (BMF), the island’s governing body for motor sport, RB24 will run from Friday, May 31 to Sunday, June 2, with The Rally Show and King of the Hill (KotH), the final shakedown and seeding event, on May 25 and 26.
Rally Director Neil Barnard said: “As our planning for the 2024 edition of Rally Barbados ramps up it was important from an organisational perspective to open entries early, but also to give all teams looking to compete – local, regional and those coming from farther afield – the confidence to proceed and finalise their planning. We have fixed the event’s 2024 dates and are looking forward to returning to that traditional ‘first weekend of June’ for RB24.”
Entries will open next Wednesday, November 15, at 3.00pm Barbados time, 7.00pm in the UK, which remains the biggest source market for international entries to the event. Entries will close in April 2024.
Since the BRC, which marked its 65th Anniversary in 2022, ran that first International All-Stage Rally in 1990, the event has grown steadily in stature to become a key component of the promotion of ‘Motorsport Island’. It has regularly contributed more than Bds $4 million annually 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. In the intervening years, the 1990 total of 35 starters has grown to an average of around 90, including more than 40 overseas entries. The event has hosted in excess of 600 competitors from 32 countries, who have racked up well over 1,000 visits between them.
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 sprint, 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.