Post Westland Rally Event Report from Ruby Racing

What a weekend, we travelled nearly 600km from Dunedin to tackle the Westland Rally for the first time.   And I have to say what a cool rally, amazing roads with a mix of fast and flowing, tight and twisty, full bush cover to wide open with lake views.

All nine stages were great to drive. We were seeded 53 and worked our way up to 31st overall and 3rd in class, 12 seconds off second at the end of stage seven.

We then seemed to loose top end power in stage eight and made the cho…ice of using a mud tyre when the stage wasn’t as muddy as it has been known to be in the past. We came out 29th overall and 4th in class by just 2.6 seconds going into the last stage. That’s when we found out how bad the fault was, we couldn’t start the car for the reverse repeat of ss8 and had to push start it. We were glad it was on a light down hill, then four minutes into the stage we had huge problem, the engine would not run under 3500rpm, was down on power and wouldn’t rev past 5000rpm, making it very hard to drive but we limped our way out.

Time control gave us funny looks with the car sitting on 4000rpm to stop it from stalling. Now all we had to do was limp the 40 odd km back to the finish line.  We did that just, to the point where we stopped in the car park and the car wouldn’t start or run again.

Overall very happy with the rest of the rally and picking up 14 points and 3rd in class for the mainland series. I would highly recommend making the trip for this rally next year. Big thanks to Nick for calling the notes and Dad and Stu for servicing and all the support from 97 Motel Moray , Ingear Performance, Themancavetv , APET , Robs Fabrication , Mag & Turbo Dunedin , Endless Brakes New Zealand , Japanese Auto Wreckers and Mosgiel Mobil.

Now we have some work to do before Otago, it’s just 16 days to be on the start line.

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