Jamaica’s Kyle Gregg joins R5 class of 2023 in Barbados

Jamaican all-rounder Kyle Gregg, a title-winner on both racetrack and rally stage, has confirmed that he will contest a full season of rallying in Barbados this year in a new Ford Fiesta Rally2, which arrived in the island this week. His campaign will include Sol Rally Barbados 2023 and all other rounds of the R5 Rally Championship presented by First Citizens, which starts with the Barbados Rally Club’s (BRC) Shakedown Stages on Sunday, April 23.

  Gregg, whose father Gary won the island’s premier event in 2006, has already tested the car with Dom Buckley Motorsport IRS in the UK, tutored by triple British Group N Rally Champion and eight-time Rally America Champion David Higgins. His co-driver will be Orry Hunte, whose father Don has been a close friend of Gary since his early days in Barbados. Sol RB23 will run on June 9-11, with The Rally Show on the previous Saturday and King of the Hill on Sunday, June 4; on-line entries close on Friday, April 28.
  A championship-winning circuit racer before he started rallying, Gregg last competed in Barbados when he won three Group 4 races in his Radical RXC at the Williams Industries International Race Meet at Bushy Park in September 2019; five years previously, he had won two of the three Caribbean Motor Racing Championship Group 2 races in his Honda Civic, finishing second in the opening race after fighting from near the back of a record 16-car grid. His circuit racing cv is impressive, a three-time Champion Driver at the Dover Raceway in Jamaica, with multiple class titles to his credit.
  Circuit racing and rallying has over-lapped, indeed Gregg became the first Jamaican to win circuit and rallysprint titles in the same year back in 2012. His first of three wins in the loose-surface Rally Jamaica came in December 2014, before his first tarmac rally, the 2015 Shakedown Stages in Barbados. Driving a Group N Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX with experienced local Sean Gill as co-driver, he finished second in class to Andrew Mallalieu’s Subaru Impreza.
  In Sol RB15, the 11 starters in Group N also included Trinidad-based Jamaican John Powell, T&T’s David Coelho and Mark Thompson of Barbados, all in Evo IXs. After a gearbox problem resulted in him retiring from the first of Friday night’s two Bushy Park stages, then failing to start the second, Gregg nevertheless contested all the weekend’s remaining 18 stages, despite no longer being in the overall running. Mallalieu and Powell fought a close battle for the Group, settled in favour of the latter by less than two seconds, but Gregg, with Michael Worme this time the co-driver, was also in the fight stage by stage, quickest on four, in the top three on another seven; they finished third in the Sunday Cup. Although he has not rallied in the island since, he continued to do so around the region, winning both Rally Jamaica and Rally Trinidad in 2019.
  Father Gary’s victory in the Rally Club’s blue riband event in 2006 came in his ex-Carlos Sainz Ford Focus WRC02, in which he had also finished third the previous year and drove to third place again in 2008. He became the first driver to win Rally Barbados and Rally Jamaica in the same year, a feat repeated only once since then, by fellow-countryman Jeff Panton in 2015. Before that, Gregg had won more than 20 motor sport titles in Group N and Group A machinery in his home country, although his early rallying was done in Barbados, where he spent much of his youth and first learned to drive.

Sol Rally Barbados (June 9-11) is a tarmac rally, with around 20 special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport, Works & Water Resources; the King of the Hill ‘shakedown’ (June 4), runs under a similar arrangement and features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for Sol RB23.

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