Today's Robertstown Rally, round 2 of the South Australian Rally Championship, has been run and won with Brendan Reeves finishing in second place, just 26 seconds behind Eli Evans.
The rally was run in dry conditions on mostly hard-packed Shire roads, despite heavy rain in the region yesterday, and consisted of seven day time stages and four at night.
A flat tyre three kilometres from the end of stage 2 slowed Reeves and co-driver, Rhianon Smyth, and resulted in them losing about 20 seconds, before they were able to change the tyre. The remainder of the rally saw Reeves and Evans trading stage wins on most of the stages and had it not been for the flat, the result may have been reversed.
The event was Smyth's first time co-driving for Reeves in two months after two events with Emma Gilmour in the Asia Pacific Rally Championship and Reeves was happy to have her back calling the notes. Reading pace notes at night, though, made her job more difficult.
"Rhianon did a great job and our notes worked really well," Reeves said. "It's pretty tricky for a co-driver to read the pacenotes at night, and as we hadn't driven those stages in daylight, I just had to have total trust in the notes and commit to them, and it worked really well."
"We had a ball today competing against Eli, and Matt (Selley, an SARC regular), was hot on our tail all rally, too, so it has a really competitive event."
Reeves and Smyth take maximum points in the SARC from this event as Evans isn't registered for the Championship, and they hope to compete in all remaining rounds of the Series, with the next event scheduled for August 1 and 2.
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