The development of Ric Cary’s MINI has been progressing along piece by piece over the past eighteen months, which Cary admits has felt like a lifetime, but he’s confident that he’ll take the start line at the National Capital Rally to give the car its maiden outing.
“Baring plague, pestilence or nuclear holocaust, I’m certain we will be in Canberra,” Cary laughed. “The car was basically ready back in September last year, but decided we need time to get it running perfectly and made the call to hold back until Canberra.”
The former circuit racing MINI has been stripped, overhauled and setup for the rigors of gravel rallying, and as that process has unfolded Cary and his team uncovered hurdle after hurdle that kept knocking their completion date further into the future.
“It has been a long process, we are pretty much twelve months behind where we originally wanted to be. I didn’t want to take the car out and waste our time and money though, I wanted to wait until the car was 100% ready before it hit the gravel properly,” Ric said.
To help speed up development Cary ran the MINI at the new Twilight Rallysprints at Eastern Creek over the summer. “Every time we ran the car it improved out of sight, plus only being twenty minutes from home gave me the confidence that if something went wrong we didn’t have far to go to get parts.”
“The plan now is to pump a few events into the car, and the driver, between now and Canberra in May. I’m really looking forward to showing our faces at Nat Cap, it’ll be great to finally show everyone all the hard work we’ve been doing,” he added.
After such a long lead time Cary has every confidence that the car is going to be up to the job, but he does have a few lingering doubts about the guy behind the steering wheel. “I’m very happy with the car, now it’s just a case of bedding in the driver!”
“I haven’t driven a front-wheel drive in anger in more than 25 years! I’ve come from four-wheel drives where you can afford to use the power to get yourself out of trouble, in these things you don’t have that luxury,” commented Cary.
“I’m expecting it’ll take me a while to get a proper feel for driving the MINI flat out. I’m probably giving away more than 20 years in age to the guys I’ll be competing against. So my aim? I’m just going to take it Round by Round and look after my own business and see where we end up come the finish.”
“I’m pretty confident we’ll get a couple of hundred kilometres out of the car without any trouble, bar of course a failure by the driver!” he joked.
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