When you say the word "Sport", Rally Driving, or any motor racing for that matter isn't exactly the first thing that springs to mind. But if you ask the oracle that is late '80's BBC 2, you will indeed see that Rally Report is a sports programme.

Right hand down a bit.

Rally Report was a favourite of mine as a young child - when I was learning to talk I got as far as "mama", "dada", and "banana and marmite sandwich" before I learned to point at the telly going "Rally Report! Rally Report!" and so, an obsession was born - and to this day nobody quite knows why. Speculation is that I liked the numbers that used to appear in the top corner of the screen but I reckon that sounds a bit boring myself.

Throughout the following 19 years Rallying has always held something of an enchantment for me - one that I could never put my finger on, but one that a £3.99 purchase from Gamestation in 1998 was fueled by - Sega Rally on the Sega Saturn. A port of the arcade game of the same title, it was about the most fun you could have with mud and gravel without trying to feed it to that really irritating ginger kid you knew, pretending it was "cake".

Fast forward to the present day. I can drive now. You know, real cars that go on tarmac and stuff, and have an interior rather than a rollcage. I'm a decent enough driver, responsible and all that - but there's still a part of me that looks like a Power Ranger that's desperate to get out and chuck a Lancia around a dirt track. The failure of Sega Rally 2 to be as astronomically good as the original hadn't dented my enthusiasm, but the original fix, the spark, had faded a little.

And every successive rally game I played managed to dim the spark just that little bit more - Gran Turismo's rally bits were horrendously boring, Colin McCrae was just a bit slow and Richard Burns Rally just didn't grab me.

A bit slow.

The problem is that Rallying on telly is a fast, furious "sport" - every car screams round every corner in a glorious shower of engine noise and dust. It's horrendously fast and yet the majority of videogame rallying portrays it as a slow, clunky affair which nearly always sees you going sideways into an invisible barrier on the first corner.

And then I bought an XBox. And there, hidden in the pile of disks that came with it was a little rallying game that I'd heard a few people say was pretty good - so after plugging the hulking great box in and listening to it whirr into life for the first time, I dropped the disc in the tray and waited.

And then Rallisport Challenge 2 finally loaded and with it, all the failed attempts at making Rallying appear as good as you want it to be just disappeared in a cloud of dust. Dusty dirty slidey icy stupid mental death-defying fun.

Rallying Perfection.

There's no other way to describe it apart from it being everything you ever imagined Rallying to be like, and then some. And it's brought the spark back with it. So maybe next year. Maybe next year it'll be my turn to have a go in the real world - do the whole Power Ranger thing and get in an old, clapped-out banger that's been in more crashes than Windows, and bollock it sideways into an invisible barrier (they have those in real life too, right?)

Until then? I'm going to be having a fucking hoot practicing. Easy right.

February 2006

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