A little bit sideways Rallying in New Zealand, where we like to get A Little Bit Sideways! Up to date Rally News from teams around the country together with event reports.
Hi there
This weekend is the final round of the New Zealand Rally Championship, the Daybreaker Rally. It is based out of Palmerston then travels through Taihape and Apiti during the monster 200km, 11 Stage day. Phillip and I are 14th on the road and the second 2wd, so we should get some great roads that aren’t to cut up.
However there is a twist, the rally starts from in Palmerston North at 3:50am Saturday morning. We then go and do two stages totalling 25km in the dark. It will be awesome to have the opportunity to do some more night stages, especially after I did pretty well in the ones in the Canterbury. We then go into the first service in Taihape to remove the light pods and check the cars over. It will be a very long day, with the first car finishing at 4:30pm after 12.5 hours of driving.
Im also looking forward to competing on roads that I have competed on before as this will be the first rally in the Fiesta that I have actually done before. I have raced on about 7 out of the 11 stages so even if they are slightly different it should be a slight advantage. There is also a huge 42km stage that will be a good one to push in and reel in some time.
The points for the NZRC is pretty much all sealed up, with us leading the 2wd Championship and FIA Championship. I am stoked with this as we came into the season not really knowing what to expect. However I’m still planning on pushing hard this weekend as it’s still possible to get on the podium in the Junior Championship, against the likes of David Holder, Lance Williams and Matt Summerfield all of which are in the lead running 4×4 turbo cars.
So I am going to be aiming for a top 10 finish and fastest 2wd, but this round will count on keeping a level head with it covering 200km of racing lasting over 12 hours, all in one day! We are planning on getting this round out of the way before we decide if we are heading to Paihia for the last round for Rally Xtreme.
As always you can get the live times on the RallySafe app/website and www.chrissport.co.nz. Also on the New Zealand Rally Championship website they will be live streaming videos, on the rallylivenz tv tab, so if you have a look on there at the right time you might get a glimpse of us live! !
A huge thanks to the sponsors Farmlands, VJ Distributers, Freshmax, HB Aviation, John Bates and Gull for all the support.
Cheers
Max
