Put down your knife and fork, it’s time for Rally México. That means the highest altitude stages of the season. And the most colourful food of the year – most of which will be eaten with your fingers.
Actually, the days of heading out for tacos or typical Mexican fare have faded in León in recent years. The city’s undergone massive change since the WRC landed there in 2004. It remains the leather capital of… where? The world? We always used to say so, but now, who knows? Certainly, less folk are wandering about the place in a pair of shiny new cowboy boots.
Fortunately for Guanajuato, my DirtFish colleague Colin Clark remains in the market for a new pair to join the pink ones he landed on a particularly colour blind day a few years ago.
Joking aside, one thing which has survived León’s blue chip hue is the desire to wear the boots on Sunday. This rally remains all about who pulls on a new pair of boots on Sunday afternoon.
As downtown León continues to sprawl south towards Silao via mall after Starbucks after Nike store, once you get out of town, you can only be in Mexico. And, with Cerro del Cubilete’s Cristo Rey statue staring down at you from 2,700 metres (yeah, old money that’s close on 9,000 feet), you could only be in Guanajuato.
That’s where McDonalds stop and the street food, the tacos and refried bean burritos begin.
Deeper into the hills and you’re into hardcore rally country – one of the few places in the world championship with a genuine wild west (in a good way) feel to it. It’s in the hamlets and the villages where you get a real feel for this rally. Not to mention your first look at a man on a horse carrying a machete.
First time this happened to me, I was on my own marching towards “a better corner just around the corner” (there’s always one, isn’t there…). He rode past me, perhaps noticing the moment of panic on my face as I realised all I had to defend myself was a nearly new Staedtler Noris (HB) and a notepad.
He stopped not far away (not nearly far away enough), swung his blade and sliced through a cacti. Turning to look at me, he grinned a pretty toothless grin and carried on about his day. Leaving me to mine.
The middle of nowhere features heavily on the route for this week’s rally, but so does the glorious city of Guanajuato (which is also the name of the state we’re in). Famous for silver mining and its extraordinarily colourful colonial architecture, all we’re interested in is what goes on in the tunnels below. And the Callejón del Beso. To the non-Spanish speakers, that’s the alley of the kiss – so called because the balconies are sufficiently close that one could lean across and kiss ones facing neighbour.
Different times. In so many ways, different times.
Rally México is a real innovator in the WRC. It was the first in modern times to house the service park entirely inside, with the poliforum used in the early years. It was the first to take the WRC subterranean, in the Guanajuato tunnels and it was the first in recent years to feature anything like a proper endurance stage with the 50-mile Guanajuatito test in 2016.
And then, who could forget the sight of rally cars ripping through the James Bond famous (and, let’s not forget for other more historic, more Méxican reasons) Zócalo piazza in the centre of México City.
Beyond the boots and the burritos, there’s plenty to be looking forward to from round three this week.
