Monday 10 October 2011

Rally - Shock Result at RoS

Typical, eh? The Results system crashed when the Nationals hit Scone Palace, for the final two stages, so it took a while to get the information - so I got these provisional results by subterfuge!

And just when we thought the winners were John McClory and David Hood scoring their first ever outright rally victory, came the shock news that they had been handbagged with a 1m 40s time penalty for late arrival at TC15A, the final control of the rally! What a bitter blow to all fair minded folk.

That penalty dropped them behind Alistair and Colin Inglis who won with a time of 1h 28m 50.7s from McClory on 1h 30m 18.3s and David Newall rounding off the top three on 1h 30m 57.4s. Nigel Feeney was fourth on 1h 33m 09.0s, Fraser Louden fifth on 1h 35m 49.8s and completing the top six was Brian Watson on 1h 37m 00.0s.

Only ten crews lasted the course and the other finishers were Max Utting 1h 37m 31.0s, Gordon Smith 1h 47m 40.5s, Alistair Hutchinson 1h 50m 49.9s in the LPG powered Renault Clio and bringing up the rear was the Nissan Micra of Lewis Roper on 2h 10m 42s - complete with broken back axle!

Missing from the finishers was early rally leader Wayne Sisson. He punctured a tyre on the final forest stage and dropped to fourth place but it would appear that the hub was damaged. So it was trailer job home.

Also bumped into Jim Carty at final service and found out why he had retired. At least he had calmed down since yesterday morning. Apparently somebody was delivering Sunoco fuel to him for the rally, but they picked up the wrong cans. It wasn't race fuel inside - it was diesel! Since modern rally cars are refuelled on a sealed system, no-one saw it getting poured in and there was no smell. They only found out 50 yards after they filled it up. It wasn't only the exhaust that was smoking after Jim found out what had happened!

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