Taranaki Tarmac Rally Review

On the weekend of the 24th and 25th of April we competed in the Taranaki Tarmac Rally, held on the roads just south of New Plymouth. This was our first tarmac rally ever, and also the first in our Subaru Impreza that we purchased late last year. Our goals for the weekend were fairly conservative, we wanted to finish the event to get miles in the car and to learn about tarmac rallying. The event consisted of 10 stages (all tarmac) based around New Plymouth, Stratford and Inglewood. There were 197km of special stages and 240km of touring stages. We joined up with Jeremy Cassel's Online Motorsport team for the weekend, and shared crew, resources and accommodation which gave us plenty of spare hands and saved us a few dollars.

Our team loaded up the car on Thursday night and drove down to New Plymouth on Friday for documentation and turbo restrictor checks that night.

The first car was away from parc ferme at 0630hrs on Saturday 24th April. We were seeded 134 (due to our late entry) but were bumped up to a starting position of 109.

We took it fairly easy on the first few stages as we were getting used to driving on tarmac. I was very surprised at the high speeds that we reached (at times we were approaching 220kpm). As the afternoon progressed we gained confidence in the car and started to attack the twisty sections a lot more, although I did lack the confidence to attack the faster sections of the special stages. This is something that we will work on in the next couple of events.

There was a lot of carnage during the day. Stage four which was a 28km test was cancelled due to a serious crash by another competitor. Unfortunetly this was a stage that also caught Jeremy out.crashing while in the top ten overall. This accident ended their event which was a disappointment for the whole team - although we were all very impressed with the car speed displayed by Jeremy and Mike, and are looking forward to some top ten results in the very near future.

We finished the event in 79 place overall in a field of 135 cars and achieved our goal of finishing our first rally, which I was absolutely thrilled about. Over the weekend we learnt a lot about our car and about racing on tarmac. With the exception of some gear box issues which slowed us down on stage 7, the car ran like a dream for the while day

We had a fantastic team for the event, with Les Ballard, Dion Wright and Tania Styles in our service crew, and Keryn Dudley in the co driver's seat. Having an experienced co-driver in Keryn was a great help and certainly contributed to our finish (and kept us out of the golf course).