crews and teams over the lengthy transport route, or the route taken on public roads to travel between special stages. The final route featured an additional in competitive kilometres compared to the 2017 route and the transport distance was shortened. The changes to the route allowed the crews to return to the service park in Deeside at the end of the first day of competition as the omission of the return to the service park had been one of the teams' criticisms of the 2017 event. Details The rally was made up of gravel roads through forests and moors. Many of these roads received little commercial traffic through the year aside from forestry maintenance and logging projects. Unlike events such as Rally Italia Sardegna and Rally Australia where loose gravel on the road surface creates dust, the road surface in Wales is made up of heavier gravel on a hard-packed road base. This creates more grip for crews in the dry, but the roads can become muddy and rutted in wet weather, particularly when a stage is used multiple times. The event featured two days in northern Wales and one day in the middle of the country. The first leg was long and started with a spectator stage at Tir Prince Raceway on the evening of 4 October. It then moved into the forests of Conwy and Gwynedd on 5 October and was made up of two passes over Clocaenog Forest, Penmachno Forest and a new stage formed by merging the Brenig reservoir stage—which was run as the Power Stage between 2014 and 2017—with the Alwen stage using parts of the B4501 to connect them. Now known as Brenig, it was the longest stage of the rally at . Penmachno Forest was run in its full length by using public roads. The Cholmondeley Castle spectator stage in England was removed and replaced by a new spectator stage called Slate Mountain. The rally moved to Powys and Ceredigion on 6 October for the longest day of the rally, totalling competitive kilometres. It consisted of two passes over the Myherin, Hafren, Dyfi and Gartheiniog stages and a single running of Dyfnant. The Hafren stage was extended to include the Sweet Lamb spectator arena. The 2018 event marked the first time since 1997 that these five stages were run on the same day. The rally returned to northern Wales on 7 October and