For the first time in two year’s Eli Evans won’t have a shot at the Australian Rally Championship, but he will no doubt prove a factor in determining the new winner, with news that he will mark his return at the season’s final Round.
Evans confirmed his entry to Rally Victoria, the sixth and final event of the year, returning in his Honda Civic Type-R alongside co-driver Glen Weston.
“As much as it seems we’d disappeared from the Championship we’ve actually been working very hard perfecting the car,” explained Eli, having not been seen since his outing at the International Rally of Queensland back in June.
With Scott Pedder and Brendan Reeves dicing it out for every point on offer at Rally Victoria, Eli Evans has a chance to make or break either driver’s chances if he can take outright positions away.
“There is a chance we could get in between them (Pedder and Reeves) and mix things up a bit. I’m sure Brendan will be quite happy for us to do that, I’m not so sure Scott will be though,” laughed Eli at the prospect.
Evans, who spent an entire day recently at the Reeves family farm utilizing their test road, said the Evans Motorsport team had focused considerable time on perfecting the Honda Civic’s engine before they felt comfortable to bring it back into the ECB ARC.
“We’ve been very busy on the car behind the scenes, we really didn’t want to bring it back to a rally until we knew it was good enough to win. Our time has been spent on the engine and tuning the performance, doing that ourselves has been a long process but we’re happy we’ve started to see results,” Eli said.
The test was a precursor to Evans and Weston contesting this weekend’s Akademos Rally, a Round of the Victorian State Championship. “It’s proving to be a bit of a mini-ARC actually. Brendan (Reeves) is entered, Justin Dowel is running, Mark Pedder too and even Darren Windus is coming out for a run.”
“It’ll be really good to give the car a competitive run against some really strong competition. It’ll give me a chance to gauge where our progress is at before we start focusing on getting ready for Rally Victoria.”
“Our time spent on the engine has meant that we haven’t had a real chance to focus too much on the chassis and handling. The roads used at the Akademos are very similar to those at Rally Victoria, so it’ll be great to get a feel for where we are at with the car,” Evans continued.
“As I said though we wouldn’t be bringing the car out unless we felt we could win. We know we have a great package, and I’ll be heading to Rally Victoria determined to get a win on the board for this year.”
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