The entry list is officially open from today – Saturday, February 15th – and the organisers of the Eifel Rallye Festival are expecting to be overwhelmed by a flood of entries. They can accept 150 historic rally cars for their three-day demonstration event but the list is always over-subscribed and will fill up long before the event is held on the last weekend of July.

The message for owners of cars who want to participate in this year’s Eifel Rallye Festival is clear – get moving and get in the queue or you might just be unlucky !

Full information on how to submit an entry can be found on the event web site at www.eifel-rallye-festival.de.

When selecting the entry list, Reinhard Klein, the founder and boss of Slowly Sideways, has a clear aim: “We will try to have an even bigger variety in terms of cars and models than last year when we had 75 different types of car from 33 different car manufacturers. Of course we know that in order to achieve this desirable state, it will be almost impossible to allow two cars of the same type unless, of course, they feature completely different liveries.”

Shortly after the 2013 event, the Festival organisers received the first informal entry for 2014. Harri Toivonen – the son of the 1968 European Rally Champion Pauli and brother of the late Henri Toivonen – was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere that he had experienced while participating in the Eifel Rallye Festival that he immediately decided to come back this year: “This is a fantastic event for all of us, the fans and the participants. When I came to the start of the first stage and saw how many great cars there were, that was really crazy.”

Last year, Harri was reunited for one stage with the original MG Metro 6R4 that he had driven in 1986 at the 1000 Lakes and RAC rallies. “The Metro still has my seat and the support pad for my knee that I made myself. When I saw the car, all the stages of the 1000 Lakes and RAC came to my mind. All the memories that I thought I had lost and forgotten, they suddenly came back and I thought: Hey, this is simply incredible, I don’t want to get out of this car ! So many memories, so many good times !” This year, Harri will not only do the full rally in the 6R4 Group B supercar, he will also be accompanied by his former co-driver from 1986, Cedric Wrede. The owner of the Metro, John Saunders, will also be in the Eifel and will switch to another historic rally car from his collection. Photos of Harri from 2013 can be downloaded for free from the McKlein Image Database under Slowly Sideways, 2013 Eifel Rallye Festival.

There will be more news of cars and drivers materialising in the five and a half months before the Eifel Rallye Festival 2014 gets underway. Christian Geistdörfer, who is responsible for the sponsor relations of the Eifel Rallye Festival, says: “I am very happy to announce that thanks to the great response to our 2013 event, all our partners from the previous year will be on board again”. Also Christian, who was World Champion in 1980 and 1982 alongside Walter Röhrl and who won the Monte Carlo Rally for the fourth time with him in 1984 with an Audi Quattro, says that: “We are working on delivering two big surprises for the Festival. We want to bring as many high points as possible to the enormous number – last year 40,000 spectators turned up – of fans who come to be part of this amazing rally car festival here in the Eifel.”

For the first time, fans from outside Germany can get weekend tickets and programmes in advance. Tickets and programmes for the Eifel Rallye Festival can be ordered from the new online shop which is available in three languages – German, English and French: www.eifel-rallye-festival.de/en/rallye-shop.html. Visitors seeking accommodation can also contact the Tourist-Information in Daun where there are English-speaking staff:-

Tel.: +49 (0) 6592 / 95 13 0 E-mail: touristinfo@daun.de
Web site: www.tourismus.daun.de