Record five-car Irish club entry for BCIC RB25

Encouraged by friends who have competed before, 30 members of the Carrick-on-Suir Motor Club in Southern Ireland will cross the Atlantic to compete in BCIC Rally Barbados 2025 for the first time this year. Driving a Ford Fiesta R5, Club Vice-Chairman Paschal O’Shea will lead a team of five cars, all newcomers, in the largest single entry from an international club in the history of the event.
  BCIC RB25, the Caribbean’s biggest motor sport international, will run from Friday, May 30 to Sunday, June 1. The Auto & Rally Show, where every car entered is on display in an annual celebration of island rallying, and the final shakedown and seeding event, First Citizens King of the Hill, fill the previous weekend (May 24/25).
  While he had known about Rally Barbados for years, O’Shea said: “We were convinced to go by Liam Ryan, who runs our car and informed me that it is like no other event we have ever taken part in and is a must for any rally fan.” In BCIC RB24, Ryan was co-driver for Ireland’s Martin Donnelly, who was already returning for his fourth visit.
  The Carrick-on-Suir MC was founded in 1958, just a year after the Barbados Rally Club (BRC) and its Willie Loughman Forest Rally is the longest running such event in Ireland, dating back to 1970. While the town is in County Tipperary, many of the team travelling to Barbados live within a 20-mile radius stretching into neighbouring Co Kilkenny.
  The club’s most prominent member was WRC driver Craig Breen, who died in a testing accident in Croatia in 2023. Joe O’Brien, club press officer for 30 years, is among the visiting co-drivers: “Craig was our club's hero and is very sadly missed. His tragic fatal accident has left a gaping void in our club, our events and in the lives of his family.”
  Breen will be remembered in the island this year, as the organising team will again include Ireland’s most successful co-driver Paul Nagle, who won RB08 & ‘09 with Kris Meeke. After his last five-year stint with Meeke, from 2014-18, Nagle sat with Breen, third in the 2022 Monte Carlo Rally for Hyundai a highlight of six WRC podiums.
  O’Shea, whose trip will celebrate his 50th birthday in 10 days’ time, drives the last of the ‘Mk1’ Fiesta R5s built by M-Sport, which spent its early life in Poland, then Belgium. Graduating from a BMW 325 Compact in which he had won the South East Stages in 2022, O’Shea, from Hugginstown in Co Kilkenny, acquired the car in 2023 after what was meant to be a one-off rental for his local Ravens Rock Tarmac Rally: “However, after spending the day in such a machine, it was very hard to give it back. So we didn’t!”
  With 11 events under their belts, O’Shea and co-driving son Larry, who is the Media Officer of Motorsport Ireland, are growing in confidence in the Fiesta, sponsored by Kilsheelan Limestone Quarries, OS Promotions and Fitzpatrick Auto Repairs, O’Shea Snr saying: “We look forward to the new challenge that is Rally Barbados.”
  Tony Canny, a solicitor from Cuffesgrange in Co Kilkenny, says he is: “looking forward to a blast in Barbados, having first heard of the event on the internet 20 years ago.” For his first rally outside Ireland, he will be travelling with wife Nessa, sons John and Joe and co-driver O’Brien, a retired lab engineer and technician, who was originally from Waterford, just half-an-hour down the road.
  They will campaign a Ford Escort MkII, powered through a sequential gearbox by a 260bhp 2-litre 16v red top Vauxhall XE race engine, prepared by Pat Leacy of Boley Motorsport, who will also be travelling. Canny has won Ireland’s South East Stages Rally Championship in the Escort, but also competes in a 1935 Riley TT Sprite replica race car, in which he has twice been Irish pre-war and pre ’55 Hillclimb and Race Champion.
  O’Brien first competed as a teenager in 1970, reading the maps for his mother in a Carrick-on-Suir MC navigation trial, finishing second in their Fiat 600D. Having ended up on his roof when he tried driving in a Quarry-cross, he stuck to co-driving, mostly in local events, navigating for fellow club members, with some decent results. He tried surfing for his 70th birthday, a parachute jump for his 71st, and says he is: “Mad looking forward to the Big Adventure in Barbados” just after his 72nd birthday in mid-May.
  Panel-beater Niall Fitzpatrick and co-driver Matthew Reade, a mechanic and farmer, both from Mullinavat, Co Kilkenny, have multiple titles on their cvs. After switching from the co-driver’s seat, Fitzpatrick won the South East Stages Championship twice, with Reade in 2023, while Reade is the reigning Midland’s East Championship co-driver. Sponsored by Kilsheelan Limestone Quarries, their Ford Escort MkI built by Fitzpatrick in 2013 is powered by a 2.1-litre 294bhp engine.
  Engineer Larry Doyle from Thomastown, Co Kilkenny is a recent returnee to motor sport, having competed in his teenage years, then spent more than 30 years away from it. Having started back in 2023 in a Honda Civic, he will be driving a recently-acquired Roto Spiral Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VII in Barbados. Son Aaron will switch from co-driver for his father to driving the Honda, having been moved up from the international reserve list this week, while brother Tommy will now co-drive the Evo for the first time. The co-driver for the Honda is yet to be determined.
  Like the rest of the group, Doyle Snr is greatly looking forward to the Caribbean trip: “I’ve never won anything major in rallying, but then again I’m only out for the thrill, the enjoyment and the company of really great people.”

Rally Barbados 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; the previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.

For media information only. No regulatory value.

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