Frank Bird Heads For Sol Rally Barbados 2022
Rising British star Frank Bird will this year realise his long-held ambition to compete in Sol Rally Barbados this June, the event won twice in a Ford Focus WRC07 by his father Paul.
Having started the season with victory in the MGJ Engineering Brands Hatch Winter Stages Rally earlier this month, the team confirmed that Penrith-born Bird and Cumbrian-based co-driver Jack Morton, who sat with Paul Bird when he finished third in Sol RB18, will enter the FIA R5 class in a Frank Bird Poultry-sponsored and Dom Buckley Motorsport-prepared Ford Fiesta Rally2 with assistance from Hager, Fuchs Titan Oils and Aico.
Bird is looking forward to his first chance to compete in Barbados, having twice missed the opportunity in recent years because of clashes with his racing programme, but for 2022, there are no planned clashes so the Cumbrian is free to make his debut on the event.
Frank Bird: “The first time I was there, I was just 10 years old. It was great going out doing pace notes and the recce. And finally, I get my chance to drive, and I can’t wait. I just wish we could have taken the Focus, that is such a special car and I know how popular it is out there.”
Former National Rally champion Paul Bird is comfortably the most successful of the Caribbean event’s international visitors, with only one DNF in his nine visits between 2008 and 2018. After four podium finishes, he finally won in 2012 and repeated the feat again in 2013 and latterly he scored another pair of podiums, the last one coming in 2018.
Sol Rally Barbados which takes place on June 4/5th 2022 is a tarmac rally, with around twenty special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport, Works, and Maintenance. The previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.
Sol Rally Barbados and King of the Hill are organised by the Barbados Rally Club, which celebrates its 65th anniversary in 2022; Sol RB22 marks the 15th year of title sponsorship by the Sol Group, the Caribbean’s largest independent oil company.
For further media information: e-mail -
robin@bradfax.com or www.rallybarbados.net and www.barbadosrallyclub.com.
