Battle to be Britain's best

Burns (left) and McRae are Rally GB favourites

British rally stars Richard Burns and Colin McRae have won the Rally of Great Britain every year they have contested it since 1994, and there is little reason to think that one of them will not do it again in 2000.

Probably because the two cut their teeth in the British rally championship on the same forest tracks that they will face in Wales this weekend, the two have made the event their own in the last few years.

In some ways, indeed, this year's Rally GB is a battle to see which one has the right to be called the best British rally driver in the world, although Burns has the added incentive of knowing he must win to have any realistic chance of the world championship.

It will be a fascinating battle between two men who, although they have the highest regard for each other's abilities, do not have a close relationship.

Burns' Subaru should have a tyre advantage

Burns and McRae get on well enough on a superficial level, but there is no doubt that there is a degree of edge between them.

For Burns, this undoubtedly stems from the years he had to spend in the mid-1990s battling to prove that Britain had more than one world class rally driver.

For a long time, Burns was very much the poor relation as McRae not only got the success - a world title in 1995 - but also inevitably attracted the lion's share of the media attention, with three wins in his home event.

McRae, meanwhile, for whom Burns was once very much an understudy at Subaru, seems not to have found it easy to adjust to his English rival's rise to a position where, if anything, he can claim to be the more successful of them in recent years.

Maturing out of mistakes

In the car, though, they are remarkably similar.

Both have proved to be every bit as fast as their rivals on the world stage - and McRae is still considered in some quarters as the out and out fastest rally driver in the world.

Yet at the same time both have proved more than capable of making mistakes that do as much harm to their hopes as their speed helps them.

While both are maturing, McRae has perhaps left this stage behind more than Burns, who has made two mistakes that have taken him out of rallies this year as opposed to McRae's one.

McRae has nothing to lose with his title hopes over

While few doubt that the winner of the Rally of Great Britain will be one of the country's home-grown talents, picking who will come out on top out of the two of them is far from easy.

This season has been so close that anything could happen in Wales this weekend. There has been almost nothing to choose between the leading teams of Peugeot, Subaru and Ford all season, and much will depend, as it has throughout the season, on which car and driver is more suited to the conditions that they find.

As much as it is possible to judge these things before the event, Burns seems to have the edge going into the Rally GB.

Although McRae has won the rally more times than the Englishman, taking three victories as opposed to two for his younger rival, the Subaru driver has been the dominant force in Britain on the last two visits, first with Mitsubishi in 1998, then with Subaru last year.

On top of that, his Pirelli tyres are expected to have an advantage on the slippery Welsh mountain roads.

Significant advantage

Michelin, which supplies Ford and Peugeot, is a formidable company, but Pirelli seems to have an answer to the British conditions that Michelin cannot find, or so the experts would have you believe.

On the other hand, though, Michelin, realising what is riding on this event, has put in an awful lot of work in perfecting its gravel tyre, and it could easily pull a surprise out of the bag.

It really is impossibly difficult to predict what might happen, and certainly Marcus Gronholm and Carlos Sainz are two competitors who have the ability and the equipment to win on merit. But realistically, either Burns or McRae surely has to win the event.

Major players

That, though, may not be enough. Gronholm heads into the Rally GB with a comfortable lead, and to a large extent the destiny of the title is out of the hands of Burns. McRae is already out of the picture.

If they win, though, Burns or McRae will know that they did everything within their power to ensure that the championship came to them, and that is all any sportsman can do.

And whatever happens, both will be around at the very top of rallying for several years to come.