There are evidently many owners of historic rally cars who are eager to follow the slogan of the Eifel Rallye Festival 2013 and celebrate forty years of the World Rally Championship. As soon as the entry lists opened on February 15th, the entries were coming in fast. After just ten days the group of course-opening cars is full according to Jürgen Lenarz who is the co-ordinator for that group. These are cars whose family trees are not as rigorously inspected as all the other Slowly Sideways cars in the one hundred and thirty strong entry.

Organiser of the Festival and President of the MSC Daun, Peter Schlömer said: ‘It was almost as if the owners of these historic rally cars had literally been waiting for the moment that the entry form was available on our website. It only took a few minutes after posting it there before we received the first entries.’

Reinhard Klein, the founder of Slowly Sideways was delighted at the rush. ‘It looks as though our previous efforts have really come to fruition! With the Eifel Rallye Festival and the Slowly Sideways group, we want to show respect to the history of rallying. Thus all vehicles entered in the main event have to be as true to the original cars from the World Rally Championship as is possible. In many historic races, it is unimaginable to have a Ferrari driving in the wrong colours or a wrong livery and that is also the trend that we are promoting in historic rallies. There are more and more people who worship the history of the sport. New cars are being restored by passionate owners and we are trying to help them to make the cars as true to the original as possible – including help from my own photographic archive.’

The Eifel Rallye Festival will run to much the same timetable as last year with a shakedown on the Thursday evening before the ‘proper’ stages on Friday and Saturday. But the shakedown is moving to the famous ‘Mantaloch’ stage based on the town of Brück where the whole place will turn into a mini-festival with a paddock for all the rally cars in its centre. After that, there will also be an open-air event back in the host city of Daun.

All the cars will be scrutineered Friday morning on the ‘Rally Mile’ in the centre of Daun thus giving everyone a chance to see the cars and meet the drivers. The first action on Friday is the gravel surfaced Bosch Super Stage in the afternoon followed by a tarmac stage going into the night. With a longish break between the two groups of stages on the Saturday, there will be another excellent opportunity to see the participants in Daun at lunchtime and again in the evening at the prize giving and party that concludes the rally.


Two further points of interest.
For anyone contemplating a trip to the Eifel Rallye Festival, they should contact the Tourist-Information Daun where there are English-speaking staff:
Tel.: +49 (0) 6592 / 95 13 0
E-mail: touristinfo@daun.de
Web site: www.tourismus.daun.de


The official DVD from the 2012 Eifel Rallye Festival with its ‘Safari Rally’ theme is now available. This has everything including some historic Safari footage from Helmut Deimel’s archive and interviews with rally stars amongst whom are Walter Röhrl, Björn Waldegård and Stig Blomqvist. It also has additional material that shows footage from all 160 cars that tackled the stages. The DVD is available from https://www.rallyandracing.com/en/rallywebshop/blu-rays-dvds/events/germany/eifel-rallye-festival-2012-dvd for €19.95.