The Ypres Rally is older than most of the championship it joined. It was founded in 1965 by a group of local enthusiasts who borrowed the regional event format from neighbouring France, and it became one of the European Rally Championship's signature gravel-free outings - the rare top-flight rally that runs entirely on narrow asphalt farm roads with stone-hard ditches on both sides. The 2020 pandemic year scrambled the World Rally Championship calendar; events in Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and Japan were all cancelled. The FIA needed late additions to fill the schedule, and Renties Ypres Rally Belgium 2021 was promoted from its regional roots to the eighth round of the world championship. From 13 to 15 August 2021, twenty-four special stages totalling 295.78 kilometres were laid out across the farmland around Ieper, the town the British called Wipers and the Belgians spell with an I.

Reigning world champions Sebastien Ogier of France and his Monegasque co-driver Julien Ingrassia, in the Toyota Yaris WRC, arrived with a thirty-seven-point lead over their Welsh teammate Elfyn Evans and Scott Martin. Thierry Neuville, the Belgian Hyundai driver who lived not far away in the French-speaking south of the country, was third in the standings and hungry to take his home rally on its first championship appearance. In the WRC2 support class, Andreas Mikkelsen led; in WRC3, Yohan Rossel held a sixteen-point margin. The Junior World Rally Championship - kids in identical 200-horsepower Ford Fiesta Rally4s, learning their craft - had Sami Pajari and Marko Salminen of Finland four points ahead of Latvians Martins Sesks and Renars Francis, with the British crew of Jon Armstrong and Phil Hall a further eleven back.

What makes the Ypres Rally distinctive on the world calendar is the road surface and the road geometry. The competitive stages run on narrow asphalt lanes that ordinary West Flanders farmers use the rest of the year to drive tractors to their potato fields. The roads are crowned, slippery in even light drizzle, often lined by deep concrete drainage ditches that will end your weekend at the slightest mistake. Hairpins come at the wheat-corner of a field, blind crests sit between hedge-rows, and the spaces between stages take the convoy past names like Passchendaele, Polygon Wood, Tyne Cot Cemetery and the Menin Gate. Drivers and engineers stayed in hotels in Ieper itself, walking past the gate every evening at eight o'clock during the bugler's Last Post ceremony for the 54,000 missing of the Salient. Then they got up in the morning and slid 1,200-kilogram cars sideways through villages where a hundred-five years earlier the war's first chlorine cloud had drifted.

Thierry Neuville won the world championship class on home soil, his Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC finishing ahead of Craig Breen in second and Kalle Rovanperä in third across the three days. Ogier and Evans, who had led the championship standings coming in, finished fifth and fourth respectively. Neuville stood on the podium in Ieper with the kind of emotion the international press described as visible from row twenty. In WRC2, the Finnish crew of Jari Huttunen and Mikko Lukka took the win in a Hyundai i20 N Rally2. In WRC3, Yohan Rossel and Alexandre Coria of France converted their points lead into another victory in a Citroen C3 Rally2. In the Junior class, where the kids try to learn how to be the next Ogier or Neuville, Jon Armstrong of Northern Ireland and his English co-driver Phil Hall took the win after starting the weekend in third. The points moved, the championship narrowed, the teams packed their service trucks for the next round in Greece, and the lanes around Ieper returned to the tractors.

By the time the spectators had gone home on Sunday night, the chequered flag was a memory and the helicopters were back in their hangars at Wevelgem, the lanes were quiet again. The same ground that had been thunderous with two-litre turbocharged engines and a quarter of a million paying fans was suddenly nothing but a hedgerow and a moon. Just down the road, an unexploded mine from June 1917 still sat under a cow pasture, waiting. The cemeteries kept their lights on. The Menin Gate ceremony took place at eight o'clock, as it has every night since 1928 except during the German occupation. The same flat green Flemish countryside that swallowed half a generation of boys a hundred-and-five years ago had hosted a different kind of speed for a weekend. Both belong to the place, and both, in their different ways, are part of why people come.