A LARGE crowd enjoyed Sunday’s lovely weather at Downpatrick, where the 2025 season opened with the track’s biggest race of the year, the Randox Ulster National.

Among spectators was Los Angeles eventing Olympian Margaret Creighton (née Tolerton), who loves her racing, but whose main function on Sunday was to fill the role of mother-of-the-bride-to-be at the hen party of her daughter, Charlotte.

The latter used to event, but hasn’t done so since the end of the 2009 season. However, she hasn’t been lost to the horse world, as she hunts regularly with the Belvoir, two of whose eight joint-Masters, Doone and Tom Chatfeild Roberts, are mother and amateur jockey brother of her fiancé Harry, who Charlotte is marrying at the end of May. Doone is a cousin of Francis Connors.

Don’t expect to see Margaret at any other horse-related events any time soon as from now on, bar the wedding of course, she will be concentrating on the career of her son William, a Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy driver.

Junior world rally champion in 2023, the 27-year-old finished second four times in seven starts in last year’s British Rally Championship in an M-Sport Fiesta Rally2.

He and his co-driver Liam Regan started 2025 with their first-ever outright BRC win in the season’s opener, the East Riding Stages Rally in February with their Castrol MEM-backed Toyota GR Yaris, which carries the well-known Creightons branding on the front and back (there’s plenty of room for more sponsor names!).

Round 2 of the Probite British Rally Championship, the Carlisle Stages, takes place on the gravel forest roads in the Kielder Forest complex next Saturday, April 12th. Between races, William spends most of his time at home in Moira where he helps out with the family business, while he has taken over the farming interests of his late grandfather Richard Tolerton, dealing mainly in store cattle.

Fitness is important for a rally driver, so William gets in a run or does a gym session every day. We presume he will have allowed himself a day off, having attended Harry’s stag party in Bath at the weekend.