MOTORSPORT: Rallying's weekend in the sun

Chris Atkinson struts his stuff on home ground
It's the biggest weekend of the year in Australia for rallying -- good old-fashioned gravel rallying.

The International Rally of Queensland on the Sunshine Coast and in its hinterland is a round of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship and the penultimate round of the Australian Rally Championship -- as well as part of the Queensland championship and the Australian Classic Rally Competition.

With Australia's World Rally Championship round now only every two years, this will be as good as it gets in rallying in Oz this year.

Eighty three cars are entered, with competitors from 10 countries.

The star attraction is Chris Atkinson, formerly Australia's regular WRC competitor but now -- since the Subaru world rally team folded -- driving for Malaysia's Proton factory team in the Asia-Pacific championship.

Atkinson won Rally Queensland six years ago and is among the favourites this weekend after the performance of the Super 2000 Proton Satria Neo in New Zealand recently -- admittedly more so in the hands of his teammate Alister McRae, the Perth-based brother of late Scottish world champion Colin McRae, rather than the Queenslander.

This event will be the opportunity for the rally fraternity to assess where Atkinson is at in his career, especially in comparison with McRae and perhaps whether he is still worthy of a WRC drive if another opportunity comes along.

The top drivers in the Asia-Pacific series are Japan's Katsu Taguchi and Indian rally champion Guarav Gill in a pair of Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution Xs for India's Team MRF.

Triple Australian champions Simon and Sue Evans won this event outright last year although competing only in the ARC section.

They will be out to do the same this weekend in their Subaru as they close on a fourth title, especially with Mitsubishi rival Scott Pedder sidelined with a broken leg from a massive crash at Rally South Australia.

Three young Australians -- Brendan Reeves, 21, Nathan Quinn, 24, and Glen Raymond, 25 -- have wildcard entries into the Asia-Pacific field.

The rally starts tonight (Friday) with two tarmac sprints at Caloundra, to be followed by 16 stages over the weekend in the Imbil State Forest near Gympie.

The total competitive distance of 276km includes two stages of about 35km -- among the longest in international rallying.

There's also a WRC round this weekend in Finland, where Norway's 2003 world champion Petter Solberg won the opening special stage last night in his privateer Citroen C4, ahead of Finn Mikko Hirvonen in a factory Ford, France's six-time world champion Sebastien Loeb in a factory Citroen, Hirvonen's countryman and teammate Jari-Matti Latvala and French youngster Sebastien Ogier in his first start as Loeb's teammate rather than in Citroen's junior squad.

Solberg has not won a WRC round for five years but has been on the podium in four of the seven rallies so far this season.

Walkinshaw shines his microscope on underperforming HRT
Holden Special Vehicles chief, Scotsman Tom Walkinshaw, has been in Australia during the mid-season break in the V8 Supercar Championship reviewing the performance of his Holden Racing Team.

This is the Holden factory's flagship team which has Garth Tander standing fifth in the championship and Will Davison 16th after they finished third and second respectively last year.

Walkinshaw's summation of HRT, reported in this week's Auto Action magazine, is: "It's not like they're not competitive. It's just that they're not competitive for long enough."

HRT's major problem has been that its tyres degrade more than those on other cars in the middle of racing stints.

Of arch-rival Triple Eight Race Engineering, which switched from running Fords with which it won the past two championships to becoming Holden's top-performing team this year, Walkinshaw said: "That's to be expected. They (Triple Eight) have got good drivers (Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes), good organisation and they're getting the rub of the green at the moment.

"They're on a good run and we're just going through a bad patch."

Walkinshaw told Auto Action editor-at-large Mark Fogarty that HRT was still in better shape than he re regained full ownership from Mark Skaife at the end of 2008.

"I think if you analyse HRT's results over the past two years compared with what's gone before then the performance on average is night-and-day better.

"If Garth (Tander) is on song then he does very well.

"He's made perhaps one or two errors, which is surprising for him, and I'd have to say I'm very disappointed in the drop-off in performance we've got with Will (Davison). It's inexplicable.

"We've looked at everything to try to figure out with him what has happened, why he's not delivering the level of performance he did a year ago. And you need the second driver to be up there to put a degree of pressure on the number one so he delivers his potential, so it's a vicious circle.

"At the end of the day you're reliant on the guys getting out there and doing their job.

"You're down to the guys delivering the results you would want on the day, and at the moment that's been missing or it's been erratic.

"I don't think there's any question that Will knows he has to lift his game in the second half of the year.

"We're not threatening him with his job or anything else.

"The guy's not stupid. He knows that what he's doing is not good enough for the equipment that he's been given -- there's no doubt about that.

"He knows that he's either over-trying or what have you, but the net result is he's not performing."

While there has been speculation about Davison returning to the Ford fold next year, Craig Wilson, who runs HRT as Walkinshaw Racing managing director, said he had been talking to the driver "about getting his performance up" in his second season at HRT.

"We need to continue working to get his performance back on track and have a basis for talks moving forward," Wilson said, adding that any serious contract renewal talks were not scheduled until after Bathurst -- more than two months away.

Red Bull claims Webber's engine OK for another race
Formula One is in Hungary this weekend for the 12th round of the world championship and Red Bull Racing says it's not worried about Mark Webber's engine that he had to nurse through the German Grand Prix a week ago and will use again in Budapest.

Team boss Christian Horner says Webber -- and supplier Renault -- managed the engine's oil issue "very, very well".

"There was no damage," Horner said.

The Ferrari team orders controversy has raged on throughout the week, but Webber said he saw no problem with how the Italian team managed Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa during the German race.

"There's always going to be certain situations at certain tracks and certain points in championships where one car is going to need to be in a definite position and the team can influence that -- so they will," Webber said.

"It's better than doing a deliberate bad pitstop, or whatever. You can do so many things to make it hard, so to try and have a rule which says that you cannot manipulate or have a team order in a GP is virtually impossible."

Budapest's Hungaroring is a circuit difficult to overtake on, so -- although only four of the GPs so far this year have been won from pole position -- qualifying will be particularly important.

It is a circuit that traditionally suits McLaren well -- it has won the past three Hungarian GPs and six of the last 11.

Irrespective of the team orders row, Ferrari's one-two finish at Hockenheim last Sunday proved its cars are back to the competitiveness expected of it.

However, it was the 2008 season-ending Brazilian GP at which Ferrari was last on pole position -- that's 28 races ago.

It's now also 100 GPs since the Williams team last won. Although its recent form has been a significant improvement, the next win for the team that is F1's third most successful -- with 113 victories to Ferrari's 212 and McLaren's 168 -- still appears a long way off.

Ambrose may go better in clearer air
NASCAR's Sprint Cup is at Pocono, Pennsylvania, this weekend. Wonder whether Australia's Marcos Ambrose might perform better there, and over the rest of the season, now that it's out in the open that he's parting ways with the JTG Daugherty team at the end of the season. No clearer indications yet of whether Ambrose will land another full-time Sprint Cup drive or return to V8 Supercar racing in Australia.

IndyCar tardy on the disciplinary front
Brazilian triple Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves has been called to front an Indycar disciplinary hearing next week over his behaviour towards officials after last weekend's race at Edmonton, Canada.

Castroneves prodded one official in the chest and grabbed another by the collar in his emotional outburst at being black-flagged for blocking Penske Racing teammate and series leader, Australian Will Power, on the final restart in that race.

Castroneves has since apologised on his website, admitting his behaviour was "totally wrong" -- even though he still didn't agree with the race penalty, which cost him the race win.

He will front the disciplinary hearing before next week's race at Lexington, Ohio, but any penalty to be imposed on him from it won't be announced until after the race.

Quite a contrast to the way things are handled in NASCAR, where discipline would have been meted out on the day.

Images: aprc.tv at youtube.com

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