News - Rally of Melb. 2

Team News from MRT

Heat One Results & Summary - Rally of Melbourne 2000
At the end of Heat 1 of the Australian rally Championship, Brett Middleton and Andrew Benefield completed the day in 7th outright. "We had some good stages and some, not so good!" Brett said. The team were simply glad to finish with no damage to the car or mechanicals.....

The event started off "wet", the roads however, probably the best in Australia to cope with the heavy rain days prior, but the slop on top of the hard packed roads was to catch out several crews, first to exit was the Mitsubishi EVO 6 team of Stewart Reid and Michelle Murphy, on a very slippery left hander close to the start of SS2 (Silvia Ck) "I think if Stewie had not gone off many more would have" Brett said. its a pity as they have put in a big effort this year and were expected to do well" he added.

STAGE NOTES

SS1 was Mt Slide a tricky blast up the side of a hill with many switch back turns, I like this stage and at car 8 the road was in good condition, so we had a bit of a go, we were equal with Dean and 2 behind Stewie, so were happy!

SS2 Silvia Ck winds back down the hole into the Yarra Valley, and is a very FAST blast at the end.I DON'T like the real fast stuff, here we got whipped by Dean and Stewie went off, we had to be careful at the start as there was bad road damage from logging trucks, and some huge pot holes, one in particular we had noted to caution and Andrew called it, but I chose to try to straddle it and we slipped into the hole side ways and the car bounced out of the hole with me fully expecting to have a flat tyre, no such thing and we pressed on!

SS3 was short blast near Marysville that ended via a HUGE logging yard and a VERY fast (5th gear) straight with fast bends, we snipped 1 sec off Dean and were happy with the result.

SS4 was the same first 2 km as above and was called Keppel's and ended at the famous Acheron Way. By this time the water spray pump in the car was removed as it was broken and the guys had drained the water spray tank and left some there!! The fast down hill part resulted in the remnants draining onto the floor and with the first hard braking I had a tidal wave of water at my feet! and 2 mins later the screen was all fogged up, so we dropped a bit.

SS5 was Acheron Way a ripper stage that gets shorter every year as the road is sealed ( ! ) However the car was very sideways and we were off the pace with a spin nosing the car over the bank and dropped time to Adrian Bukmanis, Spencer Lowndes, Dean Herridge, etc.

SS7 was almost the same ( I think I went to sleep!) we were fastest (apparently, even though it seemed slow) into the Don Road Spectator Point at 163kmph on Police radar BUT we still dropped time....

By this stage were around 9th, Spencer Lowndes was whipping us all , and even Simon Evans in his grunty Golf was making us all look bad! Spencer lost his brakes on SS7 and we were close, and Adrian was within reach of us if we nailed the last stage at De Bortoli vineyard. (SS8)

We took a risk for SS8 and ran wets, and had a big "go" for this stage in a bid to catch Adrian, however Simon broke his wheel studs and DNF'd right at the flying finish.

We ended up 7th overall setting 5th fastest on the Debortoli stage, taking 15 seconds off Adrian, to finish three seconds ahead of him overall, and we ended up only 10 seconds behind Spencer......

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