Rally - Bogie leads

Despite a spin on the first forest stage of the day, David Bogie now leads the Speyside Stages. “There was a greasy, shitty bit under the trees, and the car just slid straight on. It was braking anyway but it was going too slow to handbrake it round. It was a silly, slow speed off!”

He made up for it on the next stage taking 8 seconds out of Jock to snatch the lead by 4 seconds: “I thought I was going really well,” said Jock, “I just don’t know where he got that from.”

Donnie MacDonald is third ahead of Scottish Championship points leader, Bruce McCombie who needs a good finish today to maintain that lead.

Mike Faulkner is up to fifth after his earlier driveshaft breakage, but had a spin in SS3 and pushed the rear bumper in. No damage though. Shaun Sinclair is sixth but the boys were applying sticky tae to the rear wing: “I might have hit a tree somewhere.”

Mark McCulloch is going well but is having a recurrence of his Scottish Rally troubles with the disc pad pins coming out and losing the rear brakes, nut he is still in the top ten.

Quintin Milne was off in stage 3 but has reached service and Andy Horne picked up a front puncture in the Focus but it was near the stage finish and he didn’t lose much time. Greg McKnight had a big spin at the first corner of the first stage but didn’t strike the kerb and Scott McBeth spun his Nova in the first forest test and then couldn’t get reverse: “It’s my first run with a dog ‘box,” he explained.

And guess what? The sun is still shining. Even more inviting is the fayre on offer in the Huntly Mart cafe. As ever, the ladies have a vast array of succulent goodies for sale including quite a few heart attack specials. This is surely one of the highlights of Scottish rallying’s culinary calendar.

Leaderboard after (4 of 9) stages:

1, David Bogie, 13m 53s

2, Jock Armstrong, 13m 57s

3, Donnie MacDonald, 14m 03s

4, Bruce McCombie, 14m 19s

5, Mike Faulkner, 14m 25s

6, Shaun Sinclair, 14m 31s

7, Mark McCulloch, 14m 41s

8, Andy Horfne, 14m 49s

9, Barry Groundwater, 14m 51s

10, John Rintoul, 15m 01s