Parker battles nasty injury to extend lead
Jared Parker had to overcome new roads, night stages, a change of crew and mechanical gremlins but that wasn’t the biggest challenge he faced enroute to winning his class at the Southern Lights Rally.
Parker, the reigning Rally Challenge 2WD champion of the Brian Green Property Group New Zealand Rally Championship, took a stranglehold on the 2024 crown with a superb performance in the Deep South as he battled a painful finger injury throughout the day.
“That is a bit of my own doing really, rushing around in service one in the dark, crushed my fingers in the door,” Parker said.
“I got blood everywhere much to the disgust of the competitors next to us but thankfully they helped us patch it up.”
The injury needed a visit to A&E post event and some stitching to tidy things up, making his driving no easy feat.
It had been a disrupted build-up to the rally with many of his normal crew out of action due to university exams and then the rally went less than smoothly.
“We had our challenges through the day, but we are absolutely stoked to get to the end and have the results we had,” Parker explained.
“We replaced a radiator the day before the rally only for it to get damaged getting stuck behind cars in stage two, plus a cracked windscreen and then later in the day we lost power steering and then cracked a rim, so we were slowly losing air in one tyre.
“It was just one of those days rallying where you just know you have to fight to the very end, which is what we did, and it was all worth it.”
His performance earned Parker the MRF Drive of the Rally.
Parker leads the Rally Challenge 2WD class by 12 points from Pat Norris at the mid-way point of the season.
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