MOTORSPORT: Eureka! Time to go rallying

The national motor racing year is getting into top gear, with the Australian Rally Championship starting and the final deadline for the payment of Bathurst 6 Hour entries today.

While the ARC begins at Ballarat, with a ceremonial start in the Victorian regional city from 5.30pm today followed by two days of competition in the Wombat and Cheswick forests north-east of it, the Phillip Island Classic Car Festival of Speed – the annual regional Victorian curtain-raiser to Melbourne’s season-opening Formula 1 grand prix – is on too.

The Bathurst 6 Hour to be held at Easter had 66 approved entries, representing 17 manufacturers, last Friday but six more cars could yet make the field if they have paid the entry fee by the close of business today.

The Shannons Nationals calendar has been condensed this week from nine rounds to seven, starting at Melbourne’s Sandown next month – the weekend before Easter.

Supercar champion Shane Van Gisbergen is in Florida this weekend for his first crack at the 12 Hours of Sebring. He’s driving a Mercedes-AMG, with Americans Cooper MacNeil and Gunnar Jeannette, in the GT Daytona class.

Ryan Briscoe is there too, in one of three Ford GTs in the GTLM class. The former Sydneysider is now listed as an American, while Scott Dixon – one of his co-drivers – remains a New Zealander.

In one of the other Ford GTs is Sebastien Bourdais, the Frenchman chasing a hat-trick of Florida wins already this year after a class win in the Rolex 24 (hours) at Daytona and last weekend’s last-to-first IndyCar victory at St Petersburg.

The outright contenders at Sebring will be the Daytona Prototypes, with Cadillac having won at the Rolex 24.

Incidentally, Roger Penske tried unsuccessfully to strike a deal with Audi to run its shelved R18 LMP1 cars at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

However, Penske remains intent on returning to sports car racing in the US, with Honda his likely partner to run Daytona Prototypes next year – and ‘The Captain’ has Juan Pablo Montoya earmarked as his main driver for that campaign.

And it was announced this week that Australian rising star Matt Campbell’s drive in this year’s Porsche Supercup in Europe will be with the Fach Auto Tech team that was runner-up in the series last year and is based at Sattel in central Switzerland.

Having won the Australian Carrera Cup last year and a Porsche international scholarship, the 22-year-old Campbell’s race debut with the team will be in mid-May at the Spanish GP at the Catalunya circuit, where there is a Porsche Supercup test scheduled next month.

The 28-year-old Taylor, from Sydney, and her West Australian ex-policeman co-driver Bill Hayes have a brand new, lighter and more powerful Subaru WRX STI this season and will compete in the Production Rally Car (PRC) class this time.

Strong opposition is expected from a new MINI Cooper AP4 to be campaigned by triple champion Eli Evans with Glen Weston as his co-driver, although it has been touch-and-go to get that car – built to the new Asia-Pacific four-wheel-drive regulations – completed in time.

“Now that we will be running under the PRC regulations, one of the things we have done is fit a sequential gearbox built by Pfitzner Performance Gearboxes,” Taylor said.

“Testing recently in Tasmania (where the Subaru has again been prepared by Les Walkden Rallying) I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store.

“We had a great package in our Group N WRX STI last year, so it’s exciting to be able to build on it with the new car and continue our development.

“We had such a close championship battle last year (primarily with four-time champion Simon Evans in a Subaru Impreza and Canberra 22-year-old Harry Bates in a Super 2000 Toyota Corolla) but we’re now firmly focused on Ballarat, which – as a new ARC event – represents a significant challenge for all competitors.”

The entry of more than 50 cars for the Eureka Rally is the biggest ARC field for two years, with the subsidy from new official tyre supplier MRF (Madras Factory Rubber) having halved the cost of last year’s ARC registration fees.

The 213km of competition will comprise 10 stages on Saturday and eight on Sunday. Competition gets underway at 8:30 am on Saturday from Ballarat’s Victoria Park.

Eli Evans is playing down his chances first-up, saying the MINI’s build – which began with the chassis being shipped to Force Motorsport in New Zealand – had been squeezed into three months while it would normally have been nine months.

“I’ve got so many unknowns,” Evans said. “I’m up against it, but that’s what excites me.

“I feel I have done the two-wheel drive thing, had great success and it’s time to move on.

“To build an outright AP4 car you are looking in excess of $250,000 to do it absolutely right.

“We could have run a Citroen, Peugeot or a MINI, but we thought the MINI was cool.

“It is something different and it has a bit of a cult following that we hope to bring to rallying.”

The MINI’s 1.6 litre turbocharged engine will produce more than 300hp with strong torque.

Harry Bates, third outright last season after a flat tyre ended his chances of the title in his first full ARC season, is back in the rebuilt S2000 Toyota Corolla first campaigned by his multiple champion father Neal in the 2008 ARC.

“It’s going to be tough. Eli has a new car and I think it will be quick. Molly Taylor has a new car, so I expect her to be pushing for the win as well, and Nathan Quinn will be doing the same (in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX),” Bates said.

Always a contender when he competes in the ARC is Victorian Brendan Reeves, now with Ben Searcy as his co-driver in a Subaru WRX STI, while other podium candidates are West Australian Brad Markovic and NSW’s Tony Sullens, both in Subarus, and Tasmanian Marcus Walkem in a Mitsubishi Evo IX.

Making his debut will be Harry Bates’ younger brother Lewis in the family’s front-wheel drive Toyota Corolla in which Harry started his career.

And a surprise last-minute entry is Ballarat’s Aaron Windus in the Peugeot 208 Maxi that Mark Pedder drove last year.

Windus had planned to contest this year’s British Rally Championship but has told RallySport Magazine that “basically Vauxhall pulled out as they have no money”.

“I think this might be a one-off,” Windus said. “It’s been a real rush to get the car here.”

Finally on rallying, New Zealand’s world championship driver Hayden Paddon will have a change of co-driver during the season.

Veteran John Kennard, who has worked with Paddon for 12 years and partnered him in their Rally Argentina victory for Hyundai last year, will bow out mid-year, with Englishman Seb Marshall taking over for the final round rounds of the WRC from Rally Germany in August.

Marshall co-drove with Molly Taylor for some of her time in Europe.

2017 Australian Rally Championship calendar:
Round 1 – Eureka Rally, Ballarat, March 17-19
Round 2 – Forest Rally, WA, April 21-23
Round 3 – National Capital Rally, Canberra, May 26-28
Round 4 –Rally South Australia, September 15-17
Round 5 –Rally Australia, Coffs Harbour, November 16-19
Final deadline day on last six Bathurst 6 Hour spots
The Bathurst 6 Hour may yet get to a capacity 72 cars if six entrants who had not paid the entry fee by last Friday have coughed up the money by the end of today.

The 66 entries approved by the end of last week represent 17 manufacturers and more than 30 models.

The brands are Alfa-Romeo, Audi, BMW, Eunos, Ford, Holden, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-AMG, MINI, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Subaru and Toyota.

Production Car series champions Sherrin Racing have joined the diverse outright fight with a Brand new BMW M4, while there are two Ford Focus RS entries – but no new Mustang.

Class A1 – the extreme performance/forced induction category – accounts for 22 cars, a third of the entries approved so far.

The bumper field is well up on the 50 cars that took the start in last year’s 6 Hour, won by the BMW 335i of Chaz Mostert and Nathan Morcom.

The most cars to start an endurance race at Bathurst has been 63 - in the 1969 Hardie Ferodo 500, in the 1978 Hardie Ferodo 1000 and finally in the 1984 James Hardie 1000.

Fourteen enduros at ‘The Mountain’ have had grids of 60 or more cars.

This year’s Bathurst 6 Hour is on Sunday, April 16, starting at 11:30am.
Shannons Nationals down to seven rounds

The Shannons Nationals shrunk from the planned nine rounds to seven this week.

Dropped were a second round at Victoria’s Winton circuit in late August and the one that had been scheduled for Morgan Park in Queensland in late September.

The remaining seven rounds are in three states – Victoria with four rounds, New South Wales two and Queensland one.

Revised 2017 Shannons Nationals calendar:
Round 1 – Sandown, Melbourne, April 7-9
Round 2 – Phillip Island, Victoria, May 26-28
Round 3 – Winton, Victoria, June 9-11
Round 4 – Sydney Motorsport Park, July 7-9
Round 5 - Queensland Raceway, Ipswich, August 4-6
Round 6 – Phillip Island, Victoria, September 8-10
Round 7 – Wakefield Park, Goulburn, NSW, November 18-19

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