This week's Topaz Donegal International Rally, the fifth round of the Global Group Irish Tarmac Rally Championship, gets under way at noon today from Letterkenny and Gareth McHale will be the first to roll off the start ramp, writes RTÉ Sport's John Kenny.
There follows six stages on this afternoon, followed by ten on Saturday and the final six on Sunday before the finish back in Letterkenny on Sunday.
The organisers say they hope for a repeat of last year’s event in which over 50,000 spectators turned out to see world champion Sebastian Loeb win in his Citroen C4.
The event also marks the return to competitive action of the four-time Irish champion Eugene Donnelly who has entered in his Skoda Fabia, only the second time that the Maghera driver has competed this season.
Donnelly ran in the first round in Galway in a Subaru Impreza but failed to finish and there his championship chances ended as he ran out of sponsorship.
With 13 Irish Tarmac wins to date with four consecutive titles, and the only driver to win each individual round of the series since its inception in 1978, Donnelly has written his name into the record books, but he hasn't appeared in an Irish round since February.
Now he has decided to return for a crack at winning Donegal, although he has entered the ageing and under-developed Skoda Fabia, which failed to finish Rally Ireland last November.
The top seed is Gareth McHale in the Ford Focus and the Dubliner will be hoping for much better luck in a season that has so far been punctuated with crashes and non-finishes.
MacHale has two second places to his name, on the Circuit of Ireland and on the recent Jim Clark Rally in Scotland, but the pre-season championship favourite is a long way off the series leader Eamonn Boland.
The Co Wexford driver leads on 55 points after four rounds, 26 clear of second-placed Tim McNulty and both will be in Donegal this weekend in their Subaru Imprezas.
It was hoped that Isle of Man driver Mark Higgins would also take part, but he has withdrawn his entry as has Letterkenny’s James Cullen and Dungiven's Kevin Lynch along with two time Irish champion Andrew Nesbitt who is the unofficial King of Donegal having won the event six times.
One confirmed entry though is Kris Meeke, who at one stage was third in the Rally Ireland standings last year.
Meeke, another top class Irish driver who has struggled in recent times for sponsorship, has entered the Super 1600 Renault Clio, which took him to an excellent fifth place in the Rally of the Lakes in Killarney despite being someway short of power compared to the world rally cars of Boland, McNulty and McHale.
Meeke won Rally Barbados recently in a Toyota Corolla, and there is no doubt that he is a top class driver.
However, the downturn in the Irish economy is also hitting the championship and the likes of Meeke and Donnelly are now unable to raise budget to race expensive world rally cars, having to be content with entering cars that have little or no chance of outright victory.
Indeed, one only has too look at the current championships standings to see Co Cork's Kevin Kelleher third overall and he is driving a Group N or showroom Mitsubishi Evo, which shows the slow down in the amount of world rally cars that are now taking part in the series and how the downturn in the Irish economy is beginning to bite into Irish rallying.
Nevertheless, there is still a full compliment of 151 crews plus a host of reserves entered this weekend, so whatever the slowdown at the top end, there is still more than enough interest in the sport on both the tarmac and national scene and indeed on the forestry rallies, which are also attracting decent entries.
