Almost 30 years after his historic 1995 World Rally Championship victory, Colin McRae’s legacy lives on. His daughter, Hollie, is working to produce a worthy tribute to her dad’s long and illustrious career and documenting it for the world to enjoy.
I had the honour of interviewing Hollie about the Colin McRae Collection. Here’s what she had to say.
Lewis: Could you tell me who you are, what you do, where you are and what you’ve got going on?
Hollie: My name is Hollie McRae. I’m the daughter of Colin McRae and I’m making my own way in the rallying world. It's been something that wasn't necessarily planned but I am now involved in the media side of motorsport and it’s something that I love. Last year, I set up my own business called McRae Media and I focus on creating social media content for drivers, teams and businesses within rallying. It’s been an absolute wild ride so far and I cannot wait to see where it takes me in the future. Right now, I’m in Krakow ready for the final round of the European Rally Championship, where I’ll be working exclusively with championship leader Hayden Paddon.
Lewis: Nice. Potential championship-winning Hayden Paddon!
Hollie: Yeah, we’ve got everything crossed, just need things to go to plan…
Lewis: What are your predictions for the WRC season? How do you think it’s going to swing?
Hollie: I don't know. It’s been an interesting season and the vibes are a little bit hot amongst the competitors. I think Thierry [Neuville] seems to have it secured and he's had a relatively consistent season. Does he deserve to win? Probably, yes. But I've loved Séb Ogier’s little surprise comeback that happened on his part-time season.
Lewis: Yeah. If Ogier and Rovanperä were on a full-time basis, I think the standings would look very different…
Hollie: I love that they’re just throwing the cat amongst the pigeons. It's got people talking. I love that all three manufacturers are in the top five. I feel like it's been a big move for M-Sport and hopefully, before the end of the season, it'd be really cool to see them in the top three. If you could have each of the cars in the top three it would just add a little bit of anticipation for next season.
Lewis: Have you been watching the M-Sport documentary produced by WRC?
Hollie: I can’t remember where I was when it was released, but I got quite into it while out on the road.
Lewis: It’s excellent and tells the story nicely. A home-grown Cumbrian outfit going up against two automotive giants… It’s nice – and the team are all amazing.
Hollie: Yeah, the guys and girls over at M-Sport are great.
Lewis: From watching a few of your videos I know that you used to be a teacher. What initiated the change from teaching to rally?
Hollie: I suppose rally’s always been in the background for me. But after losing my dad and Johnny [Hollie’s brother] in the accident, my mum found it very difficult to be part of the motorsport scene because she was just hoping that dad [Colin] would be there amongst all of his mates. And because of that, my mum and I took a step back from rallying when I was eight until about age 18. We didn't watch rally at home. We didn't keep up with it and I think because of that I just never imagined that I would ever have a career in motorsport. I grew up for the remainder of my childhood and my teenage years putting my time and effort into my hobbies and the things that I enjoyed that didn't have anything to do with motorsport.
I went to university. I studied Education and became a primary school teacher in Glasgow, which was great. I do think, vocation-wise, it's always going to be there in the back of my mind. There are so many elements of the job I absolutely love, but I qualified and then started teaching just as COVID-19 started. So it was a very intense first couple of years of the job and it wasn't really what I'd imagined my teaching career to look like. There were lots of restrictions in the classroom. It was a very high-pressure job but from the classroom side of things, working with the children, I loved it. But I started to notice there was a real sort of bitterness amongst a lot of the staff. I worked with people who were counting down the days until the weekend or the next school holiday. And I was just sat there at 22 years old thinking ‘This is not how I want to live the next 40 years of my life’. So, After Covid, restrictions eased up a little, I took what I thought was going to be a year out from teaching to go and travel the world. I didn't do it before university like most people do, and it’s just never quite ended!
When I went travelling, I started ticking off all the things on my to-do list. Experiences such as skiing were things that just didn't fit into the school calendar. And when I doing these new things, I realized that I had so many different interests that I hadn't explored. I came home for a little bit and then my cousin Max, who’s a rally driver in his own right, had moved into my mum's house to start his junior European campaign. My mum suggested to Max: ‘Why don't you get Hollie along to do some social media stuff for you?’ because I'd worked in social media on and off throughout university. It was something exciting to do because Max and I hadn't spent a lot of time together growing up. I grew up in Scotland and he grew up in Australia so it was a nice way to get to know each other and for me to still travel and meet other people within rallying.
That started in 2023. I joined Max on four of his European rounds and started talking to other people, slowly getting involved in rallying again. It's just been one thing leading to another. It wasn't planned. It wasn’t ‘right we're gonna bench teaching and I want to get into rallying, I want to get into media’, it's just all sort of happened. And I am so grateful for where I'm at at the moment.
Lewis: That’s cool. So after your year out, did you expect to go back into teaching?
Hollie: Yeah, that was always the plan. It was meant to be one academic year away from teaching. I even continued to pay my membership for the Teaching Council for Scotland. I did think I would have gone back but within the first three or four months of going off and doing my own thing, I knew there was more to life than the classroom.
Lewis: Yeah, 100%. Do you think it was a perfect combination of factors that got you back into the paddock? With Max and your mum encouraging it plus your gap year and teaching just not being what you thought it would be. Did you feel ready to pursue it or did it feel a little bit strange?
Hollie: No, I'd say it's all felt very natural and I'm a big believer in everything happening for a reason and there's a right time for things to happen. And I think because of how young I was when I lost my dad, being only eight years old, I don't really have lots of memories of him rallying. That wasn't the version of my dad that I remembered, I didn't really remember spending time around rally service areas, but it was obviously a huge part of my life for the first eight years. And it's a part of my life that we didn't really speak about too often at home because people like my grandpa have those memories of their own. They experienced it first hand and for them to reflect on that life of theirs that no longer exists is really challenging, difficult and raw.
But for me, I don't have those first-hand memories so to get involved in rallying again has felt a little bit like a voyage of discovery. It's been discovering who my dad was in his career. It's been discovering what drove him and his passion for rallying. It's been discovering the sport itself and about how it works. There was an eight to ten-year gap where my mum and I didn't know anyone in the world championship. We went to one of our first rallying events in 2017. My dad and a whole host of other WRC drivers were inducted into the FIA Hall of Fame. We went along to that and there were a lot of faces that we didn't really recognize. And someone was speaking to my mom about Séb Ogier and she was adamant that they were getting his name wrong, because the last time she’d taken notice of rally, the only Séb that was competing was Sébastien Loeb. We had missed this massive chunk of the sport and I think that proves how little we got involved until then. I enjoyed getting back into it and meeting new people, it’s been special.
Lewis: That's lovely. When you said everything happens for a reason, a rain leak is what initiated the Colin McRae Collection, correct? Could you tell me a bit about that?
Hollie: It all sort of came about just by chance. My mum and my grandpa have had discussions with countless different museums and collectors about creating a space to honour my dad and his career and for various reasons, those things were just never quite followed through. And because of that, we've been sitting at home with boxes and boxes of Dad's trophies, memorabilia and different sorts of things with nowhere to put them.
My dad wasn't ever really one to have the trophies around the house, so it feels a bit odd to be putting them in our space when he wouldn’t have done that himself. But there wasn't a dedicated space for all of that stuff and the building acts as that space now. The Colin McRae Collection was my dad's old office building, so it feels right that it's now being used in this way. For the last 10 years or so, it's laid pretty dormant and still had lots of filing cabinets with paperwork and all of that fun stuff. But there was a water leak in the building and everything flooded. All of the paperwork is now mush. The floors were buckled. It was just an absolute nightmare and my mum fixed the whole thing. She ripped everything out and made it watertight and thought this was the opportunity for us to use this space to do something with all the trophies.
At this point, I was living in Glasgow. So in true Alison McRae style, she started cleaning all of the trophies and organised them from start to finish. For my mum, it’s been a very emotional process. When I moved home, she thought it’d be a nice project for me to take on to learn about Dad and his career. It was an honour to be trusted with his stuff. We’re working alongside Genesis, a 3D design and exhibition planning company that also has ties to rallying. Tom is the godson of Richard Burns, so he understands how important it is to celebrate the achievements of a rally champion.
Lewis: That's amazing. So if you had quite a good reception from within the paddock as well? I met Nicky Grist in Wales and he signed a body panel from Colin’s 1999 Ford Focus from Rally de Portugal. Might be worth getting your hands on that!
Hollie: I spoke to him in Wales, too. Funny story, the ERC coordinator, Ian Campbell, pulled over and stopped me while I was on a run. He pointed to the boot of his car and asked if I wanted what was inside. It was that exact body panel you saw Nicky sign!
Lewis: That’s so cool. Do you have some of your dad’s cars? I know you mentioned in the video that there are missing trophies, likely left in a pub somewhere. Do you know where they are?
Hollie: So this is something I've been hearing about more recently and I think my uncle Alister was worse for that [leaving trophies in pubs]. My dad would get a trophy, go to the pub and trade it for a round of drinks. So that could be where some of them are but I know there are a couple at M-Sport in Cumbria. It's quite funny that there are these pockets of time with zero trophies to speak of. As for cars, we still have five of my dad's cars and we did have more. It's such an upkeep and we don't have the appropriate space to be keeping them.
My dad's mechanic would come up yearly, give them all a service and grandpa would take them for a runaround to make sure that everything was still working properly and then they'd get put back into their little beds and that was it. Unless there was an event, like Colin McRae tribute events at Knock Hill, they didn't get used much. Some of them had started getting quite damp inside and they just weren't being properly looked after. We thought that if cars like those were owned by collectors who dedicate entire spaces to having the correct environment for these cars, they're going to be looked after, they're going to be loved and they're going to be shared with rally fans. That just wasn't the case when we had the majority of them. We now have five remaining and I'd like to say that they'll stay in the family for the rest of time but we'll just need to wait and see.
Lewis: That’s fascinating. I bet your grandpa loved taking them for a spin each year. Could you name a couple of cars which you still have?
Hollie: Yeah, so we’ve got the L555 BAT Subaru, the championship-winning car which takes pride of place and we have the car that my dad built, the R4.
Lewis: I was about to ask if you have the R4!
Hollie: Yeah, we still have it. I look at it often and think about what could have been. Even now it looks like such a modern rally car and it was built over 15 years ago. The idea behind it and my dad's vision for the whole thing is something really special and it has been sort of playing on my mind for years about not wanting to let the knowledge slip away with the people that were involved in that project. I'd love to sit down and talk about the legacy of the R4 and if there is any way that it could continue in one shape or another. We also have my dad's Autotest Mini, which was the first car he ever drove, which is literally like a little matchbox car. So special.
Lewis: Finally, with next year being 30 years since his title, do you have anything special planned?
Hollie: There have been things in talks at the moment. Things primarily just in passing. We all know what dates are coming up. It would be good to do something special but there’s nothing solidified in the books yet. I feel as though it'll be really special. For all the other anniversaries I've been not involved in motorsport, whereas this will be the first big anniversary that I’m an active part of the motorsport community and so it would be good to do something special, but I'm just not quite sure what that will look like yet.
Lewis: Hollie, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Best of luck in Poland for the ERC finale and with the rest of the Colin McRae Collection.
Hollie: Thank you. See you later.
Follow Hollie and McRae Media on Instagram to watch their journey through the rallying world:
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