Molly Taylor has won her first East Coast Bullbars Australian Rally Championship (ARC) Stage at the Quit Forest Rally today and jumped to the top of the (ARC) time sheets following the opening forest stages this morning.
Taylor and her co-driver, West Australian Bill Hayes, have been consistently quick across the morning, improving from their position of fifth overnight and will lead the chasing crews by 27.6 seconds heading into the final four stages of Heat One.
“It’s feels really good. I wasn’t expecting to win a stage at all, it certainly wasn’t the plan today, we just wanted to drive hard and get a good feeling with the car and whatever happened with the times was out of my control so obviously really happy and now just trying to think about that and just focusing on every stage as it’s own stage,” Taylor said.
Special Stage Ferndale (SS4) caused havoc for the leading crews with several of the key contenders, including overnight leaders Simon Evans/Ben Searcy in trouble by the end of the stage.
Anthony Sullens/Julia Barkley currently sitting in second position with Eli Evans/Glen Weston in third.
“The first two stages were really good this morning I just stayed out of trouble and drove as fast as I could,” Sullens said. “The last two we had a broken intercom in the car and we’ve been driving with hand signals so we have a new intercom going in now and hopefully we should be back on it again this afternoon.”
Simon Evans/Ben Searcy took a 2.6 second lead into today’s stages but a delay during the morning service, engine troubles during SS4 and an issue with their Honda Civic’s clutch during SS5 and SS6 have caused them to drop down the time sheets leaving them with a battle on their hands if they are to take the Heat One win at the end of the day.
“Recoup isn’t one of my words, it’s just full attack from this point in, the speed is there but we just have to make sure the car is reliable,” Evans said. “Molly looks to have the goods which is awesome; it’s another challenge for us… once we get the car working we have to beat Molly, but she is doing great, it’s good to see!”
West Australian crews are dominating the Australian 4WD Rally Series with the top three spots held by local crews. Dylan King/Lee Tierney are leading the charge, followed by Doug Tostevin/Tamara Adams in second and Brad Markovic and Glen Macneall in third.
“We have been going alright, we had a bit of a spin on the first stage as it was extremely slippery and caught Simon Evans during SS4 as he was having some issues but we are still pretty confident we can take our third event victory,” King said.
The Quit Forest Rally is also the opening round of the Onslow Contracting West Australian Rally Championship (WARC) and the results mirror those above with 2013 and 2014 WARC Quit Forest Rally winners Dylan King/Lee Tierney leading the charge, followed by 2014 WA Rally Champions Doug Tostevin/Tamara Adams and Brad Markovic/Glen Macneall.
Australian Rally legends Neal Bates/Coral Taylor have a commanding lead in the Classic Rally Challenge series, currently leading their nearest rivals Clay Badenoch/Andrew Dunbar, by just under 4 minutes.
Dene Braden Courtis/Anthony Staltari are holding a strong lead in the WA Clubman Cup series with Jason and Paul Lowther in second and Andrew Percival/Jessica Mansfield in third.
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