The McMRallysport team of Stephen Mee and Matthew Harriott are pressing hard to make amends for a poor start in their Australian Rally Championship Group 2 (ARC2) campaign.
With round three of the South Australian Rally Championship (SARC) “The Copyworld Walky 100” to be held in Robertstown SA on August 12, the McMRallysport team is endeavouring for a clean run during the event, and hopes to improve on their 7th outright at Round 1 of the SARC earlier this year.
Delays on part supplies for the car’s gearbox have been hampering the rebuild. After a disaster at the ARC in Canberra, they'll hopefully see the car reliable, and it prove a great shakedown at “Light-force Rally SA” to be held in the Barossa Valley in September.
“We were leading 2WD ARC2 in Canberra, when an un-noted jump damaged the rear suspension on a heavy landing,” Fee said.
“This made the car difficult to handle over the rest of the third and longest stage. We dropped to be 14 seconds behind the day’s eventual winner after the morning’s five stages. It wasn’t until service we realised the extent of the damage with a broken shock. The time to effect repairs put us out of day one, but day two was a possibility.
"MCA have been great over the past weeks in modifying our suspension set-up to resolve the problem we encountered. A piggy back canister has been created for the Corolla, and we can’t wait to test it out.”
“Day 2 looked promising with compromised handling and factory spares pulled from a shell in Neal Bates' workshop,” Harriott added.
“About 8km into the first stage we were going well until a gear tooth failure compromised the box. This loose tooth caused the box to lock and the input shaft in the box to shear. No drive ended our rally there and then.
“With a return to a factory box with uprated internals from the previous sequential, we are hoping proves a key fix. It’s still in the testing phase, but coming together well.”
With a good run in the SARC round, and a similar result at the ARC2 event in September, McMRallysport hope to gain enough points to be allocated a start in the World Rally Championship (WRC) round of the ARC to be held in Coffs Harbour in November.
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