Paul Woodford On How He Built His Career In Rally TV - My Motorsport Job...

You might know Paul Woodford as the former Circuit Manager of Cadwell Park Race Track. Or you might know him from the VW Festival at Harewood House. You could even know him as a Rally driver.

While all of these are true, he’d class himself as “a Rally TV presenter” on Special Stage - “the best source of UK Rallying and Off Road Racing videos”. We spoke to him to find out more about his career in motorsport, why Rally is his focus, and how he’s done what many people dream of - turning their passion into their career.

“I worked out a long time ago that if you start to stray away from your kind of nerd area, your specialism, you water yourself down a bit,” Paul told us. “So I was doing various things with motor racing, Rallying, I was running a race circuit. And, actually, a Rally TV presenter is what I always wanted to be as a kid.”

It was in his childhood that Paul’s lifelong love of rallying was ignited, with parents that were Rally drivers in the 1970s and ‘80s. The first trip with his dad to an RAC Rally set things in motion - Paul nagging his father to take him again until he relented.

Paul started competing in Rally, but after money and talent dried up in his mid-20s, helped by marriage, children, houses, “and the exciting stuff that means you can’t really justify having Rally cars as well,” he moved into the media side. 

“I’d started doing Rally TV, presenting for a channel called Special Stage which I sort of helped to create with the current producer, Wayne Goldring,” Paul said. Special Stage, for those out of the know, is “the biggest Rally TV channel” per Paul, boasting over 460,000 followers across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The channel has a focus on British Rally, and this is where Paul believes their - and his - success has come from.

“I think what we do is a little different. Rather than have heady ambitions like most motorsport people do of going to the very top, we actually realised very early on that what we were passionate about was the club and national side of Rallying.

“It didn’t really have a proper, high-quality spotlight, so we’ve stuck true to that.”

While he and Special Stage “have dabbled and done a few bits on international stuff”, Paul says that those aren’t what he and the team are passionate about, nor is it what the business is about. 

“Because we stayed true to [covering club Rallying] we picked up a bit of a following. We were lucky enough to then pick up sponsors who could see what we were doing and believed in it as well. It’s all grown from there really.”

For Paul and the team, following what they wanted to cover, and what they thought should be covered, was much more effective than just trying to get to the top of the ladder. 

“We were telling the stories that we wanted to tell,” said Paul. “Not looking for the headline, starry-eyed story, but actually looking for the stories that were a little bit more hidden and pulling those out, as it were, and putting them on our channel.”

There’s certainly no shortage of clubs and stories in the UK either - Motorsport UK reports that there are over 210 clubs in the UK that cater to Rallying, with others for Off-Road racing. Compare that to the 15 teams and three manufacturers in WRC, and there are far more stories to be told - and stories that would otherwise have nobody to tell them - from the club level in the UK.

“We are reaching millions of people on a weekly basis, which is pretty cool,” Paul said. “We never really thought much about that in the early days - we just went out with video cameras and microphones and told stories, and I guess that’s what we still do, in essence.”

So how did they go from a group of friends with cameras and microphones to the biggest Rally TV channel? A combination of passion, hard work, and adapting.

“We started on normal TV - on Sky - and doing stuff on some obscure channel in the middle of the night on terrestrial TV… We went from there to realising that the big audiences were online. So you could go from having tens of thousands of viewers over a few months of repeats, to suddenly having hundreds of thousands of viewers in one hit.”

This shift from a TV audience to online was somewhat of a turning point for Paul and the team, who first trialled live Rally coverage with a mobile phone at the side of Blackpool Promenade in 2015. “No one else was doing that, apart from WRC that had probably one or two live stages in those days.”

The experiment proved to be a success and, in the last ten years, Special Stage’s live coverage has gone from that single mobile phone in Blackpool, through vans with big satellites on top, to Starlinks “and multi-linked cameras and drones and stage-end cameras linked to the feed”, creating “an immersive product” which is “engaging and involving” for fans.

The way in which Rally is covered is certainly an interesting one as, despite being a motorsport, it’s unlike what most people would think of.

F1, MotoGP, GT Racing - all circuit racing really takes place on the same circular stretch of road, with everyone going out at the same time and the leader being whoever’s at the front. Everyone starts and finishes at the same point and at the same time, camera stations are permanent, and the story is fairly simple to follow. Not so for Rally.

Stages start and finish at completely different locations miles apart. Everyone’s on stage at different times. The lead can change at the drop of a hat, and Rally-defining incidents can happen out of view of cameras.

This all presents an interesting challenge for those covering the race - the story not being a simple, straight line from start to finish - but it’s a challenge which Paul enjoys.

“It’s like a juggling act, because you’ve got to try and bring in the reaction of the drivers and co-drivers, you’ve got to bring in the gossip and the news from the service area, or what’s happening on the road sections, and from fans and fan cams,” Paul explained.

“You’ve got to present the action in front of you, commentate on that, and you’ve got to obviously tell the story from a results perspective as well as the times and the battles.

“You’ve really got to paint a picture with all these facets, and it’s quite exciting.”

This means there’s not only a freedom, but a requirement, to be more creative with the narrative - creating a cohesive story from the events rather than a simple recollection.

“You have to piece the story together, and you have to really tell the story,” Paul enthused. “But if you do it right, I think the story of Rallying is more engaging because it’s a bit more real. It’s real man and woman and machine stuff - out on the road, proper adventure style of the sport, and I love it for that.”

Indeed, Rally is arguably much more “real” than circuit racing, and nowhere is this more prevalent than the cars themselves. Not only are they much closer to the road-going versions that they’re based on than race cars typically are, but they even use the roads to travel between stages - a factor that Paul loves.

“I think the cars make it as well, because Rally cars have always been a bit more fascinating to me because they drove on the public roads, which immediately captured my imagination.

“On the RAC a couple of years ago, the transit section from the Welsh stages up to Scotland, we were in the studio van heading up the M6 and there were three Ford Escorts (all leading cars at that point) and they were just in all three lanes flanking each other.

“They’d just been going through an iconic Welsh Rally stage famous for making WRC legends over the years, and now they’re driving up the M6. The headlights had been rubbed clean, the numbers on the doors and the license plates had been rubbed clean, and it just looked so cool.”

While he’s keen to remain grounded, there have been other similar moments in his career where Paul almost had to pinch himself - and he credits his continued focus on what he enjoys as the reason for these happening.

“I had dinner with [Stig Blomqvist] and Louise Aitken-Walker sat the other side, thinking ‘this is exactly what I dreamed of as a kid’. Those sort of things happen if you stay true to what you believe in, I think.

“If we’d gone searching for the bigger jobs, the bigger and more high-profile jobs don’t always come with more enjoyment. And I think we probably would have bypassed a few of those opportunities if we’d got stars in our eyes and reached too high.”

So while Paul and Rally are intrinsically linked, his story isn’t solely about Rally - it’s one of finding a niche and pursuing it, following what you’re good at, and of staying true to what you find interesting. And his final piece of advice for any other budding journalists would be to do the same.

“My one piece of advice would be that as soon as you can, get the starry-eyed kind of feet off the ground moments out of the way and realise what you’re actually good at, and what you need to be in order to be a success.

“The sooner you can get those things out of your system and realise that actually, with your feet firmly on the ground, at a more grassroots level doing what you believe in, the sooner you can get back to doing that really well.”

You can follow Paul on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/paulwoodford/ and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/paulwoodfordmedia/