The Hawkshill Championship Course at the Newmachar Golf Club, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, hosts this week, from Thursday to Sunday, the Farmfoods Scottish Challenge supported by the R&A, the 18th tournament of the season on the Challenge Tour. An event in which the Scottish ‘summer’ further increases the difficulty with rain forecast for the first three rounds (especially on Friday) and significant gusts of wind, decreasing throughout the week, but which could at times exceed 40 kilometres per hour, according to weather forecasts.
This Scottish Challenge has been a fixture on the calendar of the second European division for most of the last two decades. It started in 2006 at Murcar Links before moving to the Macdonald Cadrona Hotel for the next two years, went through the Macdonald Spey Valley from 2009 to 2018 and returned in 2022 to this new venue north of Aberdeen after a four-year hiatus. An event with a lot of tradition that counts in its list of winners with relevant names.
British talent has been the great dominator of this Scottish Challenge, with up to eleven winners including local player David Law, who won in 2018, and Englishman Andrew ‘Beef’ Johnston, who signed his first professional victory in the 2014 edition of the tournament. But there are also four non-British champions, among them, the Spaniard Javier Sainz in 2022, present again this week, and none other than the five-time major winner Brooks Koepka, whose victory in 2013, third of the season, earned him automatic promotion to the DP World Tour.
A third title that will be sought this week by Englishman John Parry, number 2 on the Road to Mallorca, and Spaniard Joel Moscatel, number 3. Lifting the trophy on Sunday would allow them to automatically access the first division of European golf without waiting for the circuit’s outcome in November. Ángel Ayora, 33rd in the general in search of getting into the fight for the cards, Álvaro Quirós, who comes from playing good golf in Ireland and will seek to improve on the greens, Borja Virto, Alejandro Cañizares, Alejandro Aguilera, Jorge Maicas, Álvaro Hernández, Albert Boneta, Quim Vidal and the aforementioned Javier Sainz will complete the list of members of the Armada present at the tournament.
2022: Javier Sainz 🇪🇸
2023: Sam Bairstow 🏴
2024: ???Who will get their hands on the #ScottishChallenge trophy at the end of this week? pic.twitter.com/YsfgXRVu4F
— Challenge Tour (@Challenge_Tour) August 6, 2024
All of them, along with winners of the DP World Tour like the Dane Lucas Bjerregaard, the Englishman David Horsey and the Scot Marc Warren, the Olympian Tapio Pulkkanen who represented Finland last week at the Paris Games at Le Golf National (he finished 35th) or the 16-year-old Ryder Cup Junior winner Kris Kim, who will make his debut this week on the Challenge Tour, will face complicated playing conditions due to the weather… and a course full of traps.
The Hawkshill, designed by the renowned architect Dave Thomas and Peter Alliss, was inaugurated in 1990 after more than ten years of planning and construction. It is a par 72 of more than 6,700 yards that demands precision at every step for its narrow and tree-lined fairways, which require great ball control from the tee, numerous water hazards and wide and strategically placed bunkers to complicate approach shots. A significant test of fire to continue advancing on the path to the dream of the DP World Tour.
