A long trek north to the land of the Big Banana was in order for the last round of the NSW Rally Sprint Series – the 2019 Coffs Harbour Rally Sprint held at Raleigh Motorsport Park on Saturday 23rd November 2019. Passing through kilometre after kilometre of burnt out bushland around Taree on the way up was a sombre reminder of why the Coffs Coast Rally WRC event had been cancelled the week prior.
It was obvious from the first recce run that this event would not suit our vehicle. The rally sprint used some newly constructed and very tight tracks through the forest along with portions of the long established bitumen kart track – which would have been great if we were in a go-kart. But unfortunately we were in a Commodore ute on rally tyres which meant there would be only one possible outcome…. horrendous understeer. We could try to drive around the problem by upsetting the car pre-apex but that meant wasting time going too sideways (yes that is a thing!). A less worse approach was to drive like a granny with neither over nor understeer – boring but marginally quicker.
This event was the first test for new gear shifter that replaced the standard Holden linkage arrangement. Whilst it was certainly an improvement I still struggled on occasion to find the right gear even though we really only needed 3 of them – so tight was the track layout. Nigel fared somewhat better by rowing through the gears a little slower. I guess I need more practice.
Whilst not our favourite event we still had a bit of fun and at the end of the day we finished with exactly the same overall time from our best two runs in each direction. This was enough to secure Nigel and Mickey 2nd Outright Rally Sprint Series – Driver & Co-Driver and 1st in Class C3: 2WD 2001cc and over – Driver & Co-Driver (To be confirmed)
CNCSCC ran the event smoothly with no issues on the day.
Next year the circuit owners are talking about extending the rally sprint track from around 3km to around 5km.
