After a competitive year, the Garrioch Motor Sport Team of Leigh and Ken Garrioch, have won the Australian F16 Rally Championship for the second year in a row.
With a perfect start of class wins in both heats of Rally Queensland and Rally South Australia, making four wins from four starts, the team went into the NEC Rally of Melbourne leading the point’s score by a slender margin.
Three F16 Mitsubishi Mirage Cyborgs were entered in the Rally of Melbourne and there was a great amount of friendly rivalry, with any one of the cars able to win the championship.
Disaster struck early for Doug Wright’s bright yellow Mirage (second placed in the F16 Championship) breaking a driveshaft in stage three on Saturday, putting him out of contention for Heat 1.
Much later in the day, in an uncharacteristic mis-judgment, Leigh Garrioch clipped a rock on the apex of a corner in the last stage of Heat 1 (SS 8). The team was leading F16 by more than 20 seconds at that stage, but the shunt resulted in a DNF.
This handed the Heat 1 lead over to the third placed championship Mirage of Brenton Kaitler.
After an overnight repair job on the Garrioch Motorsport Mirage, Leigh followed Simon Evans’ similar strategy and made a calculated drive to win the year’s championship with conservative stage times to beat the second placed Doug Wright for the Heat and the Championship!
“The dedicated work of the service crew replacing the front-end until 1.30am on Sunday morning was a great effort, it won the Championship,” Garrioch said.
“The crew probably all had some of our new sponsors’ product, 3 Ravens Beer, after the event to celebrate our win!”
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