Colin Turkington wins historic category on Tyrone Stages rally debut with Rory Kennedy
Colin Turkington added an unusual result to his motorsport career on 6 June 2026 by winning the historic category on his stage-rally debut at the Tyrone Stages Rally near Benone. The four-time British Touring Car champion drove a BMW M3 with experienced navigator Rory Kennedy at an event organised by Cookstown Motor Club. They were not the overall winners: Desi Henry and Dean O'Sullivan won the rally in a Ford Fiesta Rally2 by more than 23 seconds. Turkington's achievement was a separate class win in a discipline where he had relatively little direct competition experience.
The overall rally belonged to Henry
Henry and O'Sullivan set the pace at the top of the field, bringing their Fiesta home ahead of Mark Kelly and Will Atkins in a Skoda Fabia. Omagh driver Alan Smyth and co-driver Emmet Sherry finished third in a Volkswagen Polo. Reporting those names matters because the event did not become a touring-car star's victory parade. Turkington was one of several notable entrants, but the overall competition was settled by established rally crews driving contemporary four-wheel-drive cars.
The Tyrone Stages event was held close to Benone on the shores of Lough Foyle and counted towards the Sligo Pallets Border Rally Championship. Its location was a significant part of the story: it gave motorsport followers in the north-west an opportunity to see a nationally known circuit-racing driver compete on closed stages much closer to home than his British GT commitments. The co-driver pairing was also meaningful. Kennedy's experience brought rally navigation expertise to a team led by a driver whose outstanding career results had come on circuits.
From BTCC titles to an older rally BMW
Turkington won four British Touring Car Championships, a record that places him among the series' most successful competitors. In 2026 he had already switched to racing a BMW M4 GT4 Evo with Ernie Graham in British GT, beginning at Silverstone in April. The Tyrone rally was a different undertaking again. A historic BMW M3 used on stages requires precise pace notes, attention to changing road grip and rapid decisions over blind crests or junctions, while a GT4 event is a circuit endurance race with shared driving duties.
Turkington won the historic category, while Desi Henry took the overall rally victory. The class is designed for cars meeting particular historic eligibility rules, and rivals in modern Rally2 machinery can have significantly different performance capabilities. The significance here is the successful first attempt in the historic division, achieved while the overall front-runners fought their own competition. Turkington did not have to beat Henry's Ford Fiesta to earn a legitimate category win.
Another WRC name appeared in the entry
Northern Ireland navigator Aaron Johnston, by then a two-time world rally winner alongside Toyota's Takamoto Katsuta, also entered the Tyrone event as a driver in a Toyota Corolla. That is an unusual role reversal for a world-level co-driver, although the published event preview does not provide sufficient detail to assign him a final overall placing. Including him as an entrant is factual; claiming a particular finishing result without a classification would not be. The event therefore connected circuit-racing, modern rallying, historic competition and current WRC experience in one local programme.
