It’s hard to imagine what this guy might have achieved if he’d discovered rallying ten years ago.
Raana Horan rocked the world of offroad racing in the mid-2000s driving a brutal Nissan Safari V8 called Big Black. From his first event, he carved a name as one of the true hard-chargers in that spectacular outlaw sport.
Not satisfied with the old-school ladder chassis Safari, he brought a whole new design philosophy to the unlimited race truck class with a V8 four wheel drive Nissan Titan, and won the iconic Woodhill 100 endurance race twice on the trot. He was the first ‘truck’ class driver to win the race in its 30+ year history.
For the uninitiated, offroad racing endurance events are a cross between a race and a stage rally: go as fast as you can for as long as you can without stopping. Its flagship event is the NZ1000, run over two days and 1000km in the pine forests of the central North Island. The Woodhill 100 is 34 years old, takes the ‘100’ in its name from the old days when it was a 100-miler. It’s a sprint enduro of up to 250 km, and is the only motorsport event that still uses the wicked ‘conrod’ straights of Woodhill Forest.
Raana, though, has an insatiable need to go faster. Running out of challenges in New Zealand offroad racing, he made the jump across the ditch and shook up Aussie offroad racing with a V8 two-seater race car. He competed in the CAMS-sanctioned national championship and the punishing there-and-back red dust Finke offroad race.
But these days, it’s rallying that rocks Raana’s world. Last year he made his rallying debut here in New Zealand – and blew the establishment away with a podium finish. At the time he was driving a Mitsubishi Evo 9, chosen as a first step into rallying because the investment wasn’t as high as going straight for a factory car. Raana wanted to know if he really would like the sport before committing the big dollars.
And? Raana says he loves it – the speed, the concentration, the adrenalin. Of course, running at the front and scoring podiums in your first (slightly truncated) season would tend to colour your impression of the sport.
“Rallying is the ultimate for me. I still love offroad racing, and there are definitely skills that cross over but this is just full-on adrenalin. I really clicked with the Evo, and we invested a bit in getting it how I wanted it, so now I think I’m ready to step up,” he said.
Raana arrives at an interesting crossroads for the sport. With the older group N cars now fading into unreliability (in many cases), the leaning is toward AP4+ and R5. Proponents of these categories will insist their fave is the way to go, and the cool thing is that a car built to either spec is able to win on its day at national level.
The AP4 camp point to the (apparently) lower cost of their machinery. New Zealand’s AP4 phenomenon is actually very grass-roots, kicked off by MSNZ approving an ‘AP4+’ spec for local use. The cars are fast, raw, spectacular. Everything group N cars really weren’t.
I recall a leading driver who had a bit of success in a (metallic blue) group A car telling me he thought the N-cars were a huge mistake and would drive sponsors, drivers and spectators away. “Lazy drivers in cars that sound like tractors” was his view.
He also pointed out the greater reliability of purpose-built components in group A vs group N. A group A suspension strut might cost more initially, but it would run at peak performance all season where the group N items would need at least one rebuild to stay pin-sharp.
So along come the AP4+ cars, very much the brainchild of Andrew Hawkeswood and Force Motorsport. Bit of a revelation. Local build means parts are also locally available. New vs new, the cars have a sticker price below the R5s, whose proponents say ‘yep, but reliability is a factor’. R5 cars are built by factory or factory-aligned companies, and they do have a reliability edge. No car brand wants their motorsport profile to be tarnished by a rep for being fragile.
Some say a used R5 car is a valid – even ideal – proposition for outright glory in New Zealand. A quick trawl of R5s on European motorsport sales sites reveals a comprehensively equipped, low mileage 2017 Fabia for around $318,000; a Fiesta for less; a Citroen DS3 for $223,000 or a 2015 Peugeot 208 T16 R5, fully rebuilt, low km for slightly less: $232,000. These latter cars are on par with AP4+ pricing.
Neil Allport has of course enjoyed a long association with Ford, right back to the Group 4 days. So it’s little surprise that he’s got a factory-built R5 Fiesta available on ‘managed drive’ terms. Potent wee thing it is too.
And now Raana, ready to move up from the Mitsubishi Evo 9, has had a long talk with Neil. That discussion settles it: the step up will be to a factory-built Skoda Fabia R5.
Not just any Skoda, but the factory-spec car that won the Asia Pacific Rally Championship last year driven by Gaurav Gill. Raana looked at the local AP4+ cars but decided to opt for the R5 spec Skoda because it was already sorted in winning form.
“I decided a while ago that R5 was the better concept for me because I didn’t want to go through building a car and sorting teething troubles.”
“There are a lot of late-model cars available and that made more sense than buying a new car. This one’s ex-Skoda Motorsport,” he said. The car arrived from Australia, having also been run in one rally by Eli Evans.
So Raana’s Skoda joins Neil’s Fiesta up against a phalanx of AP4+ cars, and the Horan camp – on social media – are very pleased with themselves, looking forward to getting out on the stages as soon as they can.
For more on Raana Horan click on:The continuing emergence of the NZRC
Comments