‘MY MUM DID AUTOCROSS AND ALSO rallied on the Isle of Man. At the time the Mini was the car to have: it was your road car, your night-rally car, your stage-rally car – it did everything. So a Cooper S was quite a cool thing. My dad was a mechanic and ran the workshop for the Volvo dealership on the island. I was born in 1971, and I remember driving some of the company cars while sitting on his lap when I was five years old. We got up to 80mph at Jurby airfield!’
With formative years such as those, it’s almost inevitable that rallying would become Mark Higgins’ calling. In fact, it seemed as if the necessary skills were already coursing through his veins: ‘It was my mum who really got my dad into rallying. He had an orange Mk1 Escort Mexico and was doing an airfield event. I was eight, and he sat me on his knee and I was drifting the car left and right. He looked across at the co-driver and said, “How was he doing that?”
As soon as he possibly could, Higgins got properly behind the wheel. ‘On the Isle of Man you can pass your full licence when you’re 16,’ he explains. ‘So at one minute past midnight on my
