Rally Action, the Green Experience

Rally Action, the Green Experience

Rally Driving is not something normally associated with being environmentally conscious. Rally cars, shooting flames and throwing dirt out sideways seems somewhat at odds with reducing the carbon footprint and impact on the environment.

Some environmentalists even accuse rallying of environmental vandalism (totally untrue, however that story is for another day).

Our strategy however, is to have our cake and eat it too or rather to have our trees and race around them.

Don’t worry, we haven’t sold the rally cars, removed the engines and fitted electric motors or bought a Kombi van. Race fuel still courses through our veins and the sound of anti-lag is our alarm clock. We have however, taken on an environmentally responsible approach.

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For the last 3 years, we have been going in the opposite direction to many in regards to the environment. What started as a plan and experimentation in 2011 has bloomed into a yearly undertaking.

Over the past 100 or so years in WA, huge swarths of land have been cleared in the name of farming. You don’t realise just how much land has been cleared until you fly in or out of Perth and peer out the window to see for yourself. Following the European style of clearing land for farming in the early days has produced a raft of environmental problems for current generations. Most widelyTree planting behind tractor quoted would be global warming, however there are plenty more problems and some of those problems are immediately a lot more noticeable.

As rally drivers, we’re well used to racing through forests and around natural obstacles. Rallying in open, well cleared areas is not what we do and not how we work. As the land we purchased has much open area, 3 years ago we started a tree planting program at our venue. We have multiple goals to achieve: 1.) To rehabilitate the land and reverse some sins from the past. 2.) To reduce our carbon footprint and actually make our Subaru Rally Driving and Motorsport events carbon negative and 3.) To have more native vegetation to race around rather than open areas.

In mid July 2013 we planted another 4000 seedlings which marked the planting of more than 10,000 trees at our venue to date. For us it’s just the beginning, we’re in this for the long haul.

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The good news is we have already had some shorter term benefits from our tree planting. In areas that were once quite barren, there is now shade from trees approaching 1m tall and a noticeable return in native grasses. Between our tree planting and re-using or recycling as much as possible in our business, we’ve calculated we’re operating carbon negative.

That means that any time someone participates in one of our Rally Driving Experiences or enters a Motorsport event, they are doing their bit for the environment too. Who said Motorsport can’t be green?