Tribal Gathering

Photographer Lee Brimble and I are queuing for a burger when he unleashes his killer Colin McRae anecdote. In 2004, McRae hooked up with his old compadres at Prodrive to campaign a Ferrari 550GT S Maranello in that year's Le Mans 24 Hours enduro (in which he finished an impressive ninth overall). "So anyway," says Lee between mouthfuls of chargrilled beef, "I'm strapped in beside him in this bloody thing, trying to take pictures. And as we're approaching the chicane in the middle of the Mulsanne straight he turns to me and says, 'Hope you don't mind, but I'm feeling a wee bit slidey today.'"

Colin McRae lived his life permanently sideways. A rather dry Scotsman he may have been, and a fellow of relatively few words day-to-day, but he was a superhero behind the wheel, as flamboyant and ferociously improvisational with a rally car as Jimmy Page is when wielding a guitar.

This much we already knew. What we didn't know but are certainly finding out today is that, a year on from his untimely death in a helicopter accident, McRae has become a full-blown folk hero. While the rest of the country is basking in the afterglow of Olympic glory in Yingling (whatever that is), more than 1,000 Subaru Impreza owners have descended on Prodrive's well-hidden Warwickshire proving ground to pay tribute to a man called Colin.

Subaru and McRae: whatever else may have happened, the two are inextricably linked. Not only were they made for each other, they made each other.

The McRae Gathering, as it's known, is a curiously, perhaps even surprisingly, emotional experience. Standing at the entrance to the circuit, a seemingly never-ending river of Imprezas eddies past, the massed ranks of flat-four boxer engines issuing that familiar, warbling backbeat. It reminds us of a scene in the film "March of the Penguins." No two cars are the same; as their occupants wait patiently to be let in, it's a reminder of just how thoroughly this unglamorous but fearsomely fast Japanese saloon-and-hatch dominated the automotive firmament in the mid- to late-'90s.

There's also something life-affirming about this sort of thing: While Middle England panics about knife-wielding hoodies and collapsing house prices, here's proof that a few thousand ordinary people can still have a genuinely uplifting communal experience in 2008. But then that's rally fans for you, and not a bobble hat in sight.

There is an underlying purpose, though. Money is being raised for various charities, including the ones backed by Colin and his family. More amusingly but no less seriously, the organizers are planning an assault on the Guinness World Record for a giant car mosaic. The record currently stands at 280; a Guinness representative is on hand to officiate at today's attempt. (While he's here, he may also want to take a look at the queue for burgers; we're hungry again, but not that hungry.) The impetus for the McRae Gathering came from Glaswegian Grant Hendry. A devoted rally fan, Hendry is also a DHL courier who found himself covering the McRae family's Jerviswood patch in Lanarkshire.

"Where I grew up, you either supported Celtic or Rangers," he tells me, "so I got into motorsport instead, which saved me a whole load of trouble. I followed Jimmy McRae when I was a kid, and it was when I was watching the Galloway Hills rally one year that I first heard about his son Colin."

Hendry talks about McRae with the same hushed reverence that history buff Melvyn Bragg would talk about, say, Francis Bacon. "I remember watching him in the Network Q in '94. There was a load of us in the back of a Transit. It was so cold that we had to take one of the guys to the hospital afterward. But I remember seeing Colin in the Kielder Forest and what he was doing in the car...it was like ballet or something. Everyone could see that this guy just had some special connection with his car.

"Mind you, he was an old-school sort of talent. A guy like Tommi Mäkinen was hyper accurate, hyper smooth. Colin was always trying to fight the computers in the car. He was uncomplicated but brilliant."

The Gathering, says Hendry, was partly inspired by a similar event held last year to commemorate that other great lost British rally driving talent, Richard Burns. "It started growing legs when [Prodrive boss] David Richards heard about our plans," he continues. "I'm just a DHL courier, and I needed help with local councils and the rest of it. So the call went out to the local Scooby community, and the call was heard."

Which is why this amazing convoy sets off from McRae's hometown in Lanarkshire on the last day of August, before making its way down the M74, M6, M42 and M40, led by Prodrive's David Lapworth in McRae's world-title-winning car. With the exception of the ones belonging to local farmers, every motorway bridge between Lanark and Banbury is heaving with onlookers. There's even one spanning the M40 on which a family is enjoying a barbecue, plastic chairs and all. Colin would have been amused.

Even when things go slightly awry and 300-odd Imprezas get lost in Warwick's city center, the mood remains upbeat. And for once, nobody grumbles about the inevitable congestion on the way in. "If Carlsberg made traffic jams..." Hendry observes.

Inside, the gathering is as enthusiastic, and occasionally as eccentric, as you'd imagine. A bloke named Paul, who speaks with the oak-smoked brogue typical of the region, has driven his Impreza 22B all the way from Donegal, in Ireland's northwest corner. Originally built for McRae's codriver Nicky Grist, it's a corker. "I went to my bank manager to borrow the money to buy it," he says, "and to begin with he refused me the loan. When I told him what it was for, it turned out he was a rally driver himself, and he told me to book the flight, swing by the next day to get the bankers' draft and get the car pronto. The Impreza is the iconic common man's car. Colin wasn't driving for himself, or Prodrive. He was driving for the guys standing at the next corner."

Another (Scottish) fan is even more succinct: "Why am I here? It was Colin's driving style. Nae fear!" he says, eyes ablaze.

True enough. As we wander through the cars as they're corralled into specially marked slots — "this is the top of the 'R' in McRae," Subaru World Rally Team member Andy Philpott helpfully points out — we can't help noticing that the legend "If in doubt, flat out" is a popular one among the Gathering's faithful. Down at the other end, silver and blue cars have been assembled into a huge saltire. ("Colin was Scottish first, and British a very distant second," Grant Hendry says. "The McRae family have a history that goes back to the battle of Bannockburn.")

As the evening light begins to dwindle, the man from Guinness confirms that a new world record has indeed been set: 1,086 cars spelling out the name Colin McRae. Oh, and another: for the longest parade of cars.

The great man is a winner once again.