Rally Challenge 2WD – mid-season update
A total of four teams to date have registered for the Rally Challenge 2WD class of the Brian Green Property Group New Zealand Rally Championship. While the field has been light on numbers so far in 2024, the calibre has been high with a total of four former Challenge class champions amongst the entries.
Like previous years, the Challenge format would see competitors only tackle the opening day of the two-day events, while scoring points at three of the first five rounds, plus the season finale.
Just two cars would take the start at the season opening Otago Rally, with defending champions Jared Parker and Kyle Shears back to show their 2023 title was no fluke in their Toyota Corolla. They’d be up against Pat Norris and Geoff Parr, their 1300cc Toyota Yaris showing even the baby cars have a home in NZRC competition. The opening day, where points were on the line, took place on the fast, flowing roads out of Lawrence, south of the host city of Dunedin. Try as he may, the deficit of the 1300cc engine on the gravel highways meant Norris would concede to Parker, who’d stepped his pace up from the previous season.
South Canterbury Rally would see two more local cars join the class, with Darren Galbraith and Lisa Hudson in their Ford Fiesta ST up against not only the Parker/Shears and Norris/Parr combinations, but also Jim & Courtenay Bracefield in their Mazda RX-7 Batmobile. It was a funny twist, with Galbraith and Bracefield as co-driver combining in 2014 to win the Rally Challenge 4WD class for the year.
An accident meant all cars in the class got an assessed time on the opening stage, then from stage two Galbraith would take each of the gravel stages, with Parker keeping him honest to sit second throughout the day and taking the consolation prize of a stage win around Levels Raceway. Bracefield slotted into third for most of the day until a gearbox failure sidelined him, promoting Norris onto the podium.
The third round, the Southern Lights Rally, not only saw championship rallying return to Southland after a 20 year lay-off, but the return of night stages. Like Otago, just Parker and Norris would make the trip to the worlds Southernmost championship rally, which was thankfully held under sunny skies.
A frenzied build up to the event with a last minute radiator replacement left Parker under pressure from the start, while Norris was working with a new co-driver in Kevin Cooke. Parker’s young eyes would give him the night time advantage, by the end of SS2 he had a comfortable lead, despite catching a couple of cars and a nasty injury in the service park that saw him remove a fingernail. Again, Norris was left chasing more horsepower than the little 1300cc engine had to give on the flat out Southern roads, but with a strong reliability record again banked a solid haul of points.
After three rounds, Parker and Shears top the table, their 86 points putting them 12 points clear of Norris on 74. Despite missing round three, Parr still sits second on the co-driver leaderboard with 48 points, ahead of Galbraith and Hudson on 30.
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