Colin McRae was born in Lanark in 1968, the son of Jimmy McRae, five times British rally champion. He drove as though he had something to prove from the first stage, and crashed often enough that his early career could have ended several times. The motto attached to him — if in doubt, flat out — was only half a joke.
Subaru and the Prodrive team gave him a works drive, and in 1995, in the blue and yellow Impreza, he won the world title at the Rally of Great Britain, at twenty-seven the youngest champion the sport had then had. He was the first British driver to win it.
He never won it again, but he did not need to. He won twenty-five world championship rallies for Subaru, Ford and Citroën, often in ways no one else would have tried, and the video game that carried his name from 1998 made him famous far beyond the sport.
The two Subarus in this catalogue belong to him. The Impreza WRC of 1997 was the first car built to the new World Rally Car rules, and he won five rallies in it that year. The Impreza 22B was the road car Subaru built in 1998 to celebrate three straight manufacturers’ titles — around four hundred for Japan, sold almost immediately.
On 15 September 2007 McRae’s helicopter crashed near his home in Lanark. He was killed with his five-year-old son Johnny and two family friends. He was thirty-nine.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
