Nineteen years after his father Gary won the event, Jamaica’s Kyle Gregg added a second family victory in BCIC RB25 with island co-driver Kreigg Yearwood
The Barbados Rally Club (BRC) has announced the dates for the 36th edition of its premier event. Subject to final ratification by the Barbados Motoring Federation (BMF), BCIC Rally Barbados 2026 will run from Friday to Sunday, May 29-31, with The Auto & Rally Show and King of the Hill, the final shakedown and seeding event, the previous weekend (May 23/24).
The entry form for BCIC RB26 will go live on the official web site – rallybarbados.net – at noon local time on Wednesday, October 1, 5.00pm in the UK and Ireland; the five-month entry window will close on March 1, 2026.
In the first two years of title sponsorship from BCIC, Rally Barbados has broken all previous records. One hundred crews started for the first time in the event’s 34-year history in 2024, a record broken just 12 months later when 121 cars crossed the startline under floodlights at Bushy Park, including a record 51 from overseas, 11 from around the region and 40 from further afield.
Event Director Neil Barnard said: “The record-breaking event we had in 2025 brought into sharper focus the need for us to plan earlier and better. The sheer size of the entry presented some challenges, so we’re closing entries a bit earlier. That should give the entire team more time to manage the process, especially the logistics related to competitors traveling to Barbados to compete. We are anticipating another strong entry for the 2026 event, but let’s see what happens over the coming months.”
Following his third-place finish in 2024, Jamaica’s Kyle Gregg won BCIC RB25 with local co-driver Kreigg Yearwood; Jamaicans Jeff Panton and Mike Fennell Jnr and Bajans Josh Read and Mark Jordan were second and third. All were campaigning Ford Fiesta Rally2s, completing the first one-make podium lock-out since 2015, when Panton led a trio of Ford Focus WRCs to claim the first of four back-to-back wins.
Since the BRC, which will mark its 70th Anniversary in 2027, first 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 ‘Motorsport 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, in 2025, accounted for than 4,500 visitor nights at a traditionally quiet time of the year for tourism.
Over the years, the event has hosted just short of 630 participants from 32 countries, who have racked up around 1,500 visits between them, bringing thousands of visitors with them, friends, family and service crew; participating for the 20th time in 2025, Britain’s Andrew Costin-Hurley joined fellow-countryman Martin Stockdale (22) and Jamaica’s Jeff Panton (21) at the head of the repeat visitors list. While the main source market remains the United Kingdom and Ireland, as it is for tourism in Barbados generally, crews have come from as far afield as Japan, Kenya and New Zealand.
BCIC Rally Barbados (May 29-31, 2026) 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; King of the Hill (May 24), run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, with the results used to seed the running order for the main event.