Subaru International Rally of Canberra
EVENT
Today was day two of recognisance for the event with crews moving to the Kowen
forest East of Canberra. Having not been used by this event for some time all
teams had to do notes from scratch. A 25km stage followed by an 11 km stage with
no service in between. A real mixture of super fast and some incredibly rocky
roads will test cars to the limit.
It is my personal prediction that tyre punctures will dictate the result of this event. With limited service all based back at the Epic main service area, teams simply only need to have one flat tyre to drop them back in the field, a second flat tyre could effectively mean a DNF, as the transport distance back to Canberra whilst not huge could mean the team run out of late time and be excluded!
Dust is also going to play a large part in stage times. Special stage rallying these days is so close that stage times are often only a few seconds apart, the dry roads of Canberra are not only littered with tyre shredding rocks in some areas, but also patches of bull dust! Today in some areas the dust hung in the still forest air for many minutes. The first 20 cars are at 2minute intervals whilst the rest are at one!
If a fast car has troubles they could be effectively double penalised by being re seeded further back than car 20 and suffer the dust of as slower car all day with only a 1 minute gap.
MRT's preparation
The updated Impreza WRX of Brett Middleton and Andrew Benefield will arrive by
transporter tonight, after having some work just completed in their workshop
today.
A fresh Dog Gear set has been installed by the teams gearbox specialist, Shane, and this will be used all event as further testing of components that MRT Performance offers for current Impreza Rally Cars
We have changed the final drive ratios for this event, after making some small improvements to the gear set and to allow us to monitor wear and tear of this particular overall ratio set. Testing of the 4.4 gear set was completed last year and this is a step to advancing the design of a new batch we are manufacturing in the next few weeks.
This is MRT's first event this year, the first two State rally Championship events having been postponed due to weather in the last few months, in addition to this MRT chose to not enter the first round of the Australian Rally Championship in Perth.
Based on this the car is well prepared and the team is enthusiastic!
More news soon..
For more info log onto www.rally.com.au
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