2025 Malcolm Wilson Rally
The 2025 Malcolm Wilson Rally
1681 images of the event available here
For the uninitiated in the rally world, M-SPORT run the Ford World Rally Team and has its headquarters at Dovenby Hall, in Cumbria. The owner of M-SPORT is ex rally driver Malcolm Wilson. What I assume is a passion project for Malcolm, he puts on a rally towards the start of the year, annually. Saturday, 8th March 2025, was the 48th installment, and due to it being pretty much on my doorstep in The Lake District I headed along to photograph it. I wasn't commissioned by anyone to photograph it, it was just on spec.
There were 8 stages in total, with 7 being accessible to public spectators and 1 with restricted access. The first car left stage 1 at 07:29 and finished stage 8 just after 14:00. My plan before the event was to cover 2 stages, Stage 4 - Whythop and Stage 8 - Greystoke. The issue with covering rallying is if you plan to shoot every car, - which was the goal - you have an overlap of different cars being on different stages at the same time, that's why I originally planned to only shoot the 2 stages. I knew the last car would be through Stage 4 long before Stage 8 was supposed to start, which would give me plenty of time to drive from one to the other and get set up.
Due to personal circumstances, I only ended up shooting Stage 4 at Whythop. Here's how that went.
Knowing the stage very well, as I've shot it before, I arrived at 07:45 30 minutes before the stage went live. I parked with all the other spectators and made my hike up the trail onto the fire road.
Remote Camera
First things first was to get the remote camera set up. I use a remote camera as there is only one of me and it's better to be able to offer a selection of images rather than just one.
I decided to shoot wide, 15mm fisheye to be precise. I've seen quite a few rally images and they all seem to be tight crops of just the car, often sideways flicking up the odd stone. For me, often, it is the case where the subject should be fairly small in the frame, and you should show the environment the subject is working in. It tells more of a story. The above is the test photo from said remote camera, nice and wide, on the outside of the corner from nestled slightly above. The car expected to be mid-turn on the lower right third, hopefully throwing plenty of rocks out from behind it, with trees and sky making up the rest of the image.
Public Service Announcement
To save you from scrolling on a few times looking for the remote camera images, the remote camera failed to fire 😂. This is sometimes the case. I'd hedge my bets and say the fact it was nestled and hidden behind a tree; and i was a good few hundred meters away, also behind a tree being the reason it didn't work. It's a remote/second angle, unfortunately, you have to shoot knowing that it may not work
Main Camera
Next it was a hike, not up the easy-to-walk fire road, but straight up the side of the hill. Climbing over hefty fallen down trees, getting shanked by a plethora of bramble bushes, and sliding on the odd moss-covered branch, all whilst having a fair amount of mass on my back in the form of my camera bag.
I eventually got to where I wanted to be. Very well elevated, I could see the car on approach to the corner, going round the corner then climbing the fire road towards me. From here, I'd planned 4 photos:
- Panning with the car at a low shutter speed - 1/30th or lower - as the car climbed up the fire road towards the corner through the trees.
- A side shot of the car through the turn and exiting.
- A head on shot of the car climbing up towards me as it exits the turn.
- A pan shot from above as the car goes below me
The Images
Picture 1, Stage winner #2 Garry Pearson with co-driver Hannah McKillop. It's a good job I got my 24-70 fixed - Previously, it would only shoot at 2.8 -. Even with a polarized filter and the lowest ISO my camera shoots at, 1/20th i was still overexposed at 2.8 thus, the bump to 4.5.
- 1/20th of a second
- F4.5
- ISO 50
- manual focus
- 28mm
A fairly simple shot really and just how I envisioned it. Manual focus was chosen as there isn't a cat in hells chance that my camera could track the car through the trees and that would mean it would be out of focus. Again I shot wide, just to give some scale and show the environment. 1/20th of a second gives enough of a blur on the stationary trees whilst keeping the car fairly sharp. Whacked the white balance way up in Lightroom to give it somewhat of a Spring morning glow.
Picture 2, #171 Jordan Oldbury with co-driver Steve Gardiner.
- 1/1000th of a second
- F2.8
- ISO 1000
- auto focus
- 24mm
Another simple shot. Autofocus point was set to the upper right third; handily that's the highest the focus point goes on my camera. That means I can get some light above the trees in the shot, it also shows the path in and out that the car took/would take. Now ideally, I'd like to have shot this at F13. As you can see, I was at ISO1000 and that was at 2.8! F13 would have been ridiculous ISO wise, but it would have meant that the little drop of moisture on the lens would have had more of a star effect to it. Also on this one I put the white balance up in Lightroom to give it a Spring morning glow.
Picture 3, #43 Mark McMinn with co-driver Dick Wardle.
- 1/1000th of a second
- F2.8
- ISO 1000
- auto focus
- 70mm
A considerably tighter crop at 70mm compared to the previous 24mm. With this one, its the exact same settings as the last shot but with me crouching down. The reason I crouched was to get the golden leaves of the tree in the foreground, thus giving the image more depth. Even with a polarising filter, there's still a decent bit of glare coming off the paint work. You can imagine then, how much there was without.
Picture 4, #112 Nigel Jenkins with co-driver Kaz Jenkins.
- 1/15th of a second
- F4.5
- ISO 50
- auto focus
- 24mm
The final shot was considerably harder to get and I'll explain why. You see on my camera, i have 2 shooting modes (both manual settings). The first i had set to 1/20th to get them climbing the hill in the shade going into the corner. Then I press a button on my camera and it switches to the second set of settings where I was shooting exposed for the head on at 1/1000th. For the last shot, I wanted to pan but I couldn't use the first set of settings as they were for the shade and not direct sunlight so they would have been overexposed. Instead ,what I had to do was use my safety button...
What I normally use my safety button for is to freeze the action when I'm in my panning settings mode. Say I'm shooting speedway and panning at 1/5th of a second and the rider crashes, i swap my thumb from the autofocus button to the safety button which is set to TV (Shutter priority) at 1/1000th of a second and it will expose properly and freeze the action whilst still focusing. I rarely EVER change it but this was a situation where the quick drivers were getting to me far too quick to quickly change settings. As such I had the TV mode on the safety button set to 1/15th and I used that to pan this time instead of freeze the action.
The resulting images is face paced carnage, just like what rallying is!
All in all, it was a good event and as you can see by the above image, plenty of power was put down. This was a normal good condition level fireroad turn... My remote camera was set to the left of the tree near where you can see the people and the main shot was taken much higher up than what is shown on the top right of the image.
1681 images of the event available here