In 2001, Colin McRae’s successes as a rally driver seemed to be waning. After having a pretty solid stretch of success with Subaru’s World Rally Team, he had moved over to Ford’s World Rally Team in 1999 and things had started taking a turn for the worse. After a couple of promising victories, accidents and reliability issues had driven into the middle of 2000 and were weighing so heavily on McRae that he threatened to leave Ford if some kind of miracle didn’t take place soon. He extended his contract for 2001, and after the first four races went without any points scored, his luck suddenly turned upwards, and he took victories at Argentina, Cyprus and Greece, tying for championship points with Tommi Mäkinen. The deciding race for the 2001 driver’s championship would be the Wales Rally GB, and McRae was hell-bent on winning. Known for driving at 10/10ths normally, he went for broke and during a stage, wound up taking himself out of the race with this spectacular roll, handing the title to Subaru WRT’s Richard Burns.
For McRae, this was the crash that really slowed his career down in rally racing. He remained with Ford until 2002, when they decided to part ways after Ford refused to pay five million pounds per year for a salary. He ran with Citroën’s team for 2003, and only sporadically raced after that, competing in Dakar, 24 Hours of LeMans, and ASCAR (Europe’s equivalent of NASCAR) up until his death in 2007.
