News - Coopers Pale Ale Rally of South Australia 2

Team News from MRT

Wow what a turnaround of a weekend ...
Finishing 8th Outright on the Saturday Heat and 9th Outright on the Sunday Heat has injected new motivation into the team.

Photo by: Stuart Bowes The car ran well all weekend and with the exception of an intermittent fuel pump on Sunday we may have managed 8th, however Andrew and my self are both pleased with the results and more pleased to complete the event with no scratches on the car (well nearly none!) see below!

Heat One
Continued rain Friday overnight ensured that crews faced even more slippery roads for Saturdays early start. The first stage, a fast blast along a shire ridge road that made crews wake up FAST! Big commitment here with many 4th and 5th gear flowing corners that with one slip and the car and crew would be minced meat. Incredibly the factory Group N cars up front were fast and put the pressure on the two WRC cars or Bourne and Bates.

Following this the rest of the day was a mixture of forest roads interlaced with Shire roads and plenty of spectator points for the thousands of people who braved the miserable conditions to see the forest flyers at their best.

Servicing was made easy with a central service, so crews were able to set up and enjoy the occasional glimpses of sunny weather, however the continued light rain made the job that much harder as rally cars appeared with a few hundred Kilo's of mud hanging off every part!

The day finished with a blast around Adelaide Showground, this was to be a super special with a inner man made track, water splash and jumps. however the rain turned the man made track into a bog hole and organisers were forced to also delete the water splash, so crews simply did 2 1/2 laps. This still proved a crowd favourite as the (old horse trotting track) road
had not deteriorated yet and 2wd or powerful (committed) 4wd cars were able to do big power slides in 3rd gear.....much to the crowds delight, of whom were there in thousands, over 15,000 and many were turned away when the grandstands and standing room only areas were over filled to capacity!

Heat Two
Photo by: Stuart Bowes More rain Saturday overnight meant the roads we have ran on Sunday heat two were even worse. The course being the same as Saturday. This forced organisers to shorten some stages and re route others.

Following the success of day one the MRT crew were all pumped up for another great day of slippin' and slidin' in the forests! However the pace was hot and we started off a little too conservative, this was soon compounded by fuel pump problems. Unfortunately this was not diagnosed until midway through the day and our stage times suffered, with the car coughing and spluttering several times, so bad that on one stage we parked the car three times, before we re started it!

The motivation of the hardy spectators in the forest was enough to have a go on the roads that we enjoyed and this showed, especially after the fuel pump was replaced. This scored us a top 4 outright on one stage and a few top 5 times so we all were happy.

A small error resulted in the only (visible) damage to the car, this event allows many opportunities to "cut" and "clip" corners all in a bid to shave valuable seconds off stage times. One particular corner on a crest had some star picket posts, and I turned the car into apex the corner and it slid as expected then gained grip, resulting in my new apex being the wrong side of the post! Well with a good stage time to get I kept the foot to the floor and drove over the post, expecting to only smash a fog light cover (not too costly). However as I did I saw a shower of parts fly over the bonnet as I lined up for the next corner, to find at the end of stage, the fog lamp cover had survived and the headlamp and park lamp gone! bad news! these were ten times more costly than the fog cover!. Oh' well at least we set 4th fastest!!!

Overall, personally I drove the car harder than ever, however I did take it easy on the roads I was not comfortable with, especially the slippery narrow ones, in particular one stage that was littered with stumps either side of the road for several Km's and mostly only a car wide! This showed in our stage times, the fun stages we did better and Andrew did an excellent job on the pace notes......many times he had to speak as fast as he could to simply read out all the data we had noted the previous day, at over 140 km/hr this is pretty important!

The event was won by Possum Bourne and Craig Vincent in their Subaru Impreza WRC
Second was Neal Bates and Coral Taylor in their Corolla WRC
EQUAL Third was Cody Crocker and Greg Foletta in their Impreza and Ed Ordynski and Iain Stewart in a Lancer, both in Group N

Roll on Tasmania!

The next event is the Saxon Safari Rd 4 of the ARC in Hobart, Tasmania, the most Southern Capital City of Australia, on the weekend of the 4th and 5th of August.

All plans falling into place MRT expect to debut a brand new Group A engine that has been in development for the last 6 months. This will be tight as personally I am away over seas on business for 2 1/2 weeks and the MRT crew as well as staff at MRT Performance will have to work hard to get all things read for the trip South. This event means the truck and car are away for over 2 weeks, having to drive to Melbourne (Capital of Victoria) then put the vehicles on a boat for the overnight transport to Devonport, on the North coast of Tasmania, whilst the crew catch a flight to meet it...then drive onto Hobart.

MRT will once again stay at the fantastic Salamanca Inn , right in Hobart, this is the 5th year we have stayed there and the management and staff are the best, and certainly can make any guest feel at home.

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