Castrol joint title sponsor

In 1968 Castrol became a title sponsor of the rally alongside the Express and Star. This was to be the first of Castrol's thirteen years of association with the event.

The rally was by now an established forestry event. The rally started at the cattle market in Shrewsbury and went straight into a typical Welsh night road rally until a breakfast halt at Barmouth. Here the character changed to a 20 stage, forest stage event with the finish back at Shrewsbury.

A 400 mile route.

Richard Harper was the Clerk of the Course for his last time and he had put together a mammoth route of over 400 road miles. He had wished to have run the event as an all stage event but even then the costs were prohibitive. The event that finally emerged could rightly have been seen as the most complete test of a rally crew's skills as there has ever been in Wales.
The eventual winning crew was Colin Malkin and John Brown, followed home by Roy Fidler and Barry Hughes in second spot and Jim Bullough and Don Barrow in third.