Dave Holder and Jason Farmer are the other two New Zealanders contesting this weekend’s Rally Turkey. The pair, from Mount Manganui and Hamilton respectively, are competing in the Junior World Rally Championship category and although they temporarily withdrew from the rally on Friday’s run through special stage five – the longest and toughest of the rally – due to having three punctures, they say it’s one of the best day’s rallying they’ve had all year.
Holder says: “It was a promising morning for us, a nice consistent run, and the times were good.” Holder and Farmer set mid-field for the morning’s loop of three stages, going into the lunchtime service sixth in the JWRC field of 12.
“Really, really rough conditions, even on the first pass, it was Russian roulette what was going to be around each corner,” Holder adds. “It was definitely a matter of dodging the big rocks, but our pace was nice and easy, and thought we managed the car quite well. So we were quite happy to finished sixth in the morning but still in touch in with the leaders.”
Holder’s plan for the afternoon was to tone it back a bit to try and navigate around the bigger rocks safely.
“In SS5, the first 6km of it’s pretty nice, then there’s about 10km of really rough stuff, we were just trying to manage the car through there. Unfortunately we got a puncture and bent a rim when it impacted a rock. We changed that pretty quickly and carried on down the road about a kilometre, then got another puncture. Pulled over to change that and noticed that we had another puncture! So that makes a total of three and only two spares in the car. Do the math, it didn’t really work out for us to get back to service with another 40km of stages to go. It meant we had to retire temporarily, and eventually made to back to service on the back of a truck. It gives us massive time penalties, but we’re still back for the rally tomorrow. We’ll try and do much the same again, maybe move up the stage times a wee bit and nudge on in the areas that are a bit smoother…although there’s not too many of them! So, in many ways, a promising day for us, probably the best day we’ve had this year aside from the troubles. Definitely looking forward to tomorrow.”
Saturday takes competitors from the rally base in Marmaris in south-west Turkey along a peninsula to the west for 130.62km for another repeated loop of three stages. Four short stages from 10am Sunday conclude with the power stage’s unique route which finishes in the service park.
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