RYAN MacHugh has been nominated for the 2023 Billy Coleman Young Rally Driver of the Year Award.
The Frosses man is one of seven drivers nominated for the award and will be up for an interview next Wednesday to try advance to the final three.
The winner will then be announced at an Awards night in Dublin next month.
The winner of the Billy Coleman Award receives €100,000 worth of support to contest rallies nationally and internationally in 2024.
And the talented young driver is hoping he can come out on top to help give his career a massive boost.
“I’m delighted, it’s one of the top awards in Ireland for young people in the sport.
“It’ll be tough to get to the top three, there are a few boys there who have been nominated before so they’re at an advantage with the interview.
“It would open up a lot of doors to maybe going overseas and rallying, it could take us to the British Championship and then further afield like the ERC (European Rally Championship) Juniors.
“It would be life-changing to win, €100,000 to be invested into rallying and now that I’m nominated I’m in with the MI (Motorsport Ireland) Rally Academy so you’re learning all the time and they give fitness and mental training and prep so even being nominated to get that side of it is good.”
The 25-year-old, who caught the Rallying bug from uncles Joe and Dermot MacHugh, has been competing since 2021 so is still relatively new to competing, but he has had a brilliant couple of years.
He won the Class 2 National Championship this year in his Ford Fiesta Rally4 along with co-driver and Glenties man Declan Boyle, and the pair won the Junior Donegal Interantional Rally title last year and the 2022 Tarmac Junior Championship.
“In 2018 I bought a car and 2019 I did a couple of RSA events and was ready to start up in 2020 but it got kicked two years down the road then.
“I done the Harvest Rally in Donegal Town for my first and I won the Junior that day. We went on and did the Irish Tarmac Junior Championship and won it then this year we won the Class 2 in the Rally4 car.
“The biggest highlight would have been the Donegal in 2022 winning the Junior title and then this year overall getting the championship would have been our high point.
“We didn’t really know what to expect going into the year because we were going from right hand drive to left hand drive and there’s a lot more things to learn in a different car.
“I got a (left hand drive) road car six months before the rally and I was driving that every day which was one of the biggest helps.”
With the Donegal Harvest mini stages rally just passed, MacHugh pulled his entry to focus on getting his car up to speed over the winter and as the year comes to a close, he hasn’t got a proper target set for next year yet.
Thanking NMH Motorsport and his co-driver Declan Boyle for the help over the year to receive the nomination, he also remarked on the coincidence of it being the second year in-a-row that a Frosses man has been up for the award, after Eamonn Kelly won it last year.
“I haven’t set my sight on anything, I just want to go as far as I can with the support I get and I feel if I got the Billy Coleman Award it would be a big stepping stone and a gateway into European Rallying.
“You’d be getting a lot of help and open a lot of doors for sponsorship and it’d be fairly cool if for two years in-a-row it came back to Frosses.”
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