Molly Taylor and Bill Hayes have reigned supreme at the Make Smoking History Forest Rally in Nannup, on Sunday.
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Taylor said she had been chasing the WA victory for a while and it was her favourite rally on the Australian Rally Championship tour.
“I have always wanted to have this win and after a disappointing start in the first round to come back with this in round two was more than we could hope for,” she said.
Nathan Quinn and Ben Searcy finished the day, and the rally, in second outright with the local crew Brad Markovic and Toni Feaver in third.
Both crews proved that staying below the radar and remaining consistent all weekend was the key to standing on the podium at the end of the event.
After an opening heat which saw some of the closest rallying the CAMS Australian Rally Championship has seen in recent years, with five lead changes and four stage winners, the action in heat two was more about survival.
Eli Evans and Glen Weston jumped out of the box this morning getting out to an early lead before their rally all but ended with high-speed collision with a concrete water tank during the sixth stage of the heat.
The Tankformers team was able to get the car back into the service park and repair the Peugeot enough to limp across the finish line and salvage some all-important Championship points.
Evans said it was not the finish we were hoping for but the rejoin rules in the ARC allow cars to officially finish the rally by going over the final stop control.
“It would have been silly not to try and take advantage of that and salvage as many points as we could for the rally,” he said.
A puncture on the following stage saw a rally victory all but slip from the hands of Harry Bates and John McCarthy, a fate that was sealed on SS17 when they stopped on stage suffering a mechanical drama.
As the dust settled on the roads of the Nannup plantation forest the event had not only seen a new winner stand on top of the podium but a new driver take the lead in the ARC, with Nathan Quinn snatching the lead from Harry Bates by two points.
“It’s cool that I get to be on the top of the list for the time being but the Championship is like a rally and you can see what happened to Harry and Eli today and it’s not necessarily about leading at one point in the event it’s about leading at the end of the year, so I am going to take it with a grain of salt for the time being,” Quinn said.
“Hopefully we can get some more sponsorship support and I will be able to get to Canberra.”
More than 50 crews from across Australia contested the Make Smoking History Forest Rally through the forests of Nannup and Busselton.
