BCIC RB24 winner Maloney heads for the UK

BCIC Rally Barbados 2024 winner Stuart Maloney will lead a group of well-known island competitors across the Atlantic to England next week to compete in the MGJ Engineering Brands Hatch Winter Stages (January 17), in which he finished sixth last year.
 The group comprises his regular co-driver Kristian Yearwood, his brother Mark and Brian Gill, all competing there for the first time, while America’s George Sherman returns for a third visit, having finished 10th last year; each will drive a Skoda Fabia RS Rally2.
 The one-day rally is the fourth round of the UK’s Protyre Circuit Rally Championship (CRC) and the first event of the iconic circuit’s year-long Century of Power programme, as the former home of the British GP marks 100 years as a competitive sporting venue.
 The Maloneys are seeded at six and seven, Stuart ahead of Mark, partnered by Steve McNulty, who sat with Stuart last year and is a regular part of the island rallying scene. Sherman and co-driver Neil Colman are at 23, while Gill starts at 30 with Jordan Jones on the notes. There are currently 76 starters.
 The 10th season of the CRC has enjoyed a very competitive start, with three different winners in the early rounds last November in three makes of car: Joe Cunningham and Josh Beer, who finished seventh in BCIC RB25, won the Neil Howard Stages at Oulton Park in a Ford Fiesta WRC, Champions for the past two seasons Michael Igoe and Nick Atkins won the Cadwell Stages in a Citroen C3 Rally2, while 2022/23 titlists John Griffiths and Emma Morrison carried their Fabia R5 to victory at Donington Park.
 With daylight hours limited in the UK at this time of year, there are two runs each between 9.00am and around 5.00pm through four different stage configurations for a total mileage of just over 32 miles. The layouts use elements of the racetrack, pit lane, paddock and service roads, with two laps of each stage requiring merge and split points, contributing to the challenge for competing crews.

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.