Having competed in the SA rally on two other occasions, Miles said a scheduling clash had prevented him from competing in the last three Adelaide rallies and he is therefore gearing up for an ‘excellent adventure’.
“The last three years Adelaide has actually clashed with the Australian Safari Rally,” Miles said. “I run the sweeper and organise the recovery crew for that event, so for the last three years we haven’t been able to go over to Adelaide,” he added.
The thing Miles enjoys the most about the event is driving amongst the large number of fans who attend the rally and he has welcomed the change of scenery from WA’s bushland.
“In WA we do nothing but rally in the bush so we only see trees and kangaroos but in Adelaide you are using council roads and driving through people’s paddocks,” he said. “It is a different atmosphere over there; you are rallying in amongst the people, which just makes it an awesome trip.”
Confessing to making the trip for pleasure more than anything else, Miles said he would be delighted with a top ten result.
“We were ninth outright in the WA section of the Forest Rally so if we can do the same thing in SA then we’ll be really rapt.”
Scott Pedder, with WA co-driver Jon Mortimer, currently sits in second place in the Australian Rally Championship and wants to improve on the seventh place at Coffs Coast where bald tyres caused an ‘off’ that handed victory to Simon Evans.
“We had a roll over at Coffs,” Mortimer said. “It came down to whoever won the last stage, won the event. Unfortunately with the amount of kilometres that event had, we had to go out to the last stage with bald tyres.”
“We basically got caught out on the fourth corner of the last stage and the rest is history,” he said.
Mortimer believes their high-speed, high-output Lancer suits the SA event but said he and Pedder will ease in to the event before going head to head with Simon and Sue Evans for the Australian Rally Championship lead.
“We definitely have the car speed but we just have to make sure we don’t do anything silly or make any mistakes and we should return good times,” he said. “With that, hopefully we can put a bit of pressure back on Simon and hopefully he makes some sort of mistake.”
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