Covering the FIA Historic Regularity Rally in Switzerland

It's been a busy few weeks and I must apologise for not writing a feature last week.

This weekend I was in Switzerland for the Alpine Challenge, which was the final of the 2020 FIA Trophy for Historic Regularity Rallies. This is the first time I have worked on a regularity rally and it is very different from the other type of rallies I have worked on.

In the FIA European Historic Sporting Rally Championship the cars compete against the clock, trying to be the fastest through a stage, with the fastest over the two or three days of stages being declared the winner.

In regularity the cars have to complete a stage in a set time, to the nearest minute. They mustn't be quicker or slower or they receive penalty points. The further away they are from the set time, the more penalty points they receive. The crew with the least number of points at the end of the rally are declared the winners. The events are held on public roads, with the average speed being 50kph, this is far from the fire breathing Sierra RS Cosworths and Porsche 911s I work with on the EHSRC, but it is still very interesting.

The Alpine Challenge was based in the Swiss Alps in the town of Villars-sur-Ollon, a part of the world I have never visited before. My role as the FIA Media Delegate for the event was to write the reports and film videos for the FIA website and social media feeds. I did have the opportunity to take some still images as well for the reports.

The image at the top of the page was taken on the Fujifilm X-T4 and a Fujinon XF10-24mm f4 wide angle zoom. I used a Haida Filters polariser and Red Diamond 0.9 ND Grad filters. In post production I used the new Eterna Bleach film simulation and then worked a bit on it to get the look I wanted. The car is the Opel Kadett GTE that was the winner of the National Regularity Rally that ran behind the cars entered in the FIA Trophy section.

The overall winner was the no7 Opel Ascona of Belgian crew Michel Decremer and Patrick Lienne, who accrued the least number of penalty points over the three days.

This image of the Opel Ascona was taken on an X-T4 and XF16-55mm f2.8 with Haida polariser and ND grad.

My focus was shooting plenty of video for the three 60 second review videos that I produced and published for the FIA. These were shot on my two X-T4s, two GoPro Hero 8 Blacks and a GoPro Hero 5 Black, with the drone footage from my DJI Mavic Air after I decided to leave the DJI Phantom 4 Pro back in Scotland due to its size.

Here are the three review videos -