Speaking to RallySport Magazine this week, Glenney said that he was unsure what Ford or Mitsubishi had planned for the 2007 rally season, and that he was still waiting on that “elusive phone call”.
“I decided to pick and choose what events I did in 2006 because I didn’t have the budget to contest the full ARC,” Glenney said.
He competed in, and led, Targa Tasmania earlier this year, and then upset the factory teams with victory in his home round of the ARC last month. But, unfortunately, he’ll only appear at the Rally of Melbourne as a spectator.
“It really is an expensive sport,” Glenney added. “We did the Rally of SA on a shoestring, which meant taking risks by not replacing things like driveshafts and turbos before the event, but that still cost us $20,000 for the event.”
He says that when he contested the same rally last year, it cost him between $30,000 and $40,000.
Asked whether control tyres and fuel would make a big difference and help reduce the costs, he said he thought it would.
“At the moment if you want to run right at the front of the field, where I want to run, you have to use the same number of tyres as the factory teams, which means 20 per event. If we were restricted to 12 per event we’d need to run a harder compound, but as we’d all be in the same boat, I don’t see that as a problem,” he said.
“Many people say that the entry fee and fuel are some of the biggests costs in rallying, but really they are quite small. As an example, we’ll spend between $5000 and $6000 on tyres for one event. That’s where the expense lies.”
It has been widely hypothesised that if Ford or Mitsubishi run a second car in 2007, then Glenney would be the obvious choice as the second driver.
SUBSCRIBE BELOW TO READ THE FULL STORY
