Rally Sweden
Sign in to saveannual rallying competition in Sweden
Key facts
- Status
- active
- Genre
- motorsporting event
- Date
- February
- Frequency
- annual
- Locations
- Umeå , Västerbotten
- Country
- Sweden
- Inaugurated
- 1950 ( 1950 )
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Has part
- 2015 Rally Sweden
- Country
- Sweden
- Sport
- motorsport
- Official website
- rallysweden.com
- Image
- RallySweden.png
Show 7 more facts
- topic has template
- Template:Rally Sweden
- Commons category
- Rally Sweden
- topic's main category
- Category:Swedish Rally
- inception
- 1950-01-01
- month of the year
- February
- social media followers
- 36953
- number of viewers/listeners
- 276078
Sources (3)
via Wikidata · CC0
~3 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Rally Sweden (Swedish: Svenska rallyt), formerly the KAK-Rally, the International Swedish Rally, and later the Uddeholm Swedish Rally, is an automobile rally competition held in February in Värmland, Sweden and relocated to Umeå in 2022. First held in 1950, as a summer rally called the Rally to the Midnight Sun (Swedish: Midnattssolsrallyt) with start and finish at separate locations, seventeen years later both start and finish became located in Karlstad. The main service park is located in the town of Torsby, which is actually much closer to the special stages than Karlstad. The competition is spread out over three days with the start of the first part on Friday morning and the finish on Sunday afternoon.
In 1973 the rally was introduced to the World Rally Championship and started to get international attention; the Swedish Rally has been also traditionally the only rally held on snow. Like Rally Finland, for many years the rally was known to be very difficult for non-Nordic drivers. The first driver to win the Swedish Rally not hailing from Sweden or Finland was Frenchman Sébastien Loeb in 2004; Frenchman Sébastien Ogier was the second non-Nordic winner (with wins in 2013, 2015 and 2016), and since then Belgian Thierry Neuville and Welshman Elfyn Evans have also recorded wins at the event. Estonian Ott Tänak also won in 2019 and 2023, but the question of whether or not Estonia is a "Nordic" country remains an open debate. Spaniard Carlos Sainz finished second four times and third two times.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Rally Sweden” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.