Motor Sports ColumnRally Ireland 2007 was the highlight of the motor sport year here. The country's first round of the World Championship was won by Sebastien Loeb, the French ace also winning the Donegal and Cork Internationals in his Citroen C4 WRC.
Unfortunately the sting went out of the rally when Marcus Gronholm crashed his Ford Focus RS on the third road stage, and Loeb was unchallenged by his team-mate Dani Sordo (Spain) and Finnish drivers Jari-Matti Latvala and Mikko Hirvonen in Ford Focus RSs.
Hirvonen's fourth was good enough to clinch the manufacturers' championship for Ford. Loeb was happy enough to finish third in the final round in Wales to claim the drivers' championship for a fourth consecutive year.
Irish drivers scored notable successes abroad, with Shaun Gallagher (Letterkenny) winning Rookie of the Year in the World Rally Championship at the wheel of a Citroen C2.
Michael Cullen (Dublin) won the European Ferrari Challenge for a second time, while Ollie O'Donovan (Limerick) became the sixth Irish driver to win the British Rallycross Championship.
Jenny Ryan (Athy) won four races, had several podium finishes and a 100 per cent finishing record in all 18 rounds of the "Great and British" Mini Challenge which she won outright, along with the Mini Cooper Club Class and the Ladies' Championship.
In the 40th year of Formula Ford 1600, an Irish team claimed all three podium places for the second successive year in the Kent Festival at Brands Hatch, won by Keith Dempsey from Robert Barrable and Peter McKenna. Peter Dempsey (Ashbourne) won the Walter Hayes Trophy at Silverstone for the second successive year.
The Irish team of Eddie Peterson, Eamonn Byrne, Simon Echlin and James Pringle won the Ken Wharton International Autotest at Alcester in Warwickshire for the fourth year in a row, beating England by 69 seconds.
Other Irish successes were scored by Niall Breen (Dundalk), in a round of the British International Formula Three Championship at Oulton Park and Daniel Barry (Enniskerry) in the final round of the British Mitsubishi Rally Challenge.
It would be a shame to let the year pass without mentioning two notable achievements.
The Crossle Car Company celebrated a unique 50 years of manufacturing racing cars. It is seriously remiss of Irish motorsport not to have honoured John Crossle's invaluable service to motor racing.
The organisers of the Phoenix Park motor races deserve special praise for maintaining over a one hundred years' tradition of road racing in Dublin.
FIXTURES: Sunday: Cork MC, Rallysprint, The Pike, Dungarvan, Co Waterford, 11am.
