Drake wins Premier League at Rally Tasmania

Check out the off road ‘moment’ at 5:30 in the above video! – “I was thankful that the tyres found some grip and just barely pulled the car away from the rock bank”

Charlie Drake and Eoin Moynihan took Premier League honours in last weekend’s Rally Tasmania.  Here’s Charlie’s report on the weekend…..

We had a really good weekend in Tassie and are happy we got the premier league points which was the aim for the weekend.

It was a last minute decision to do Rally Tasmania but I had never been there and I’d always wanted to try a tarmac rally so on the day the entries closed I rang Dasher(Darren Williams) and asked him could the car be repaired from the off in Batemans Bay last year? I got my answer quickly and it was a BIG NO…. but a miracle happened and the boys made the impossible possible. We were three hours late for scrunity – that’s how last minute the final car assembly was…….

We improved all weekend so I was happy and ending up finishing 7th on sunday to put us well ahead in the Premier League. I had trouble with recce on whether to write the notes as I would drive them in the rally or the way I drove them when the roads were opened to the public. Some bends are severe when you are driving them on open roads but by cutting and staying out wide they become less severe. I decided to write them as we would drive on open roads and just took it as it came in the rally. It took most of Saturday to get the driving line someway right as I was coming in too tight on the tight stuff so Eoin kept telling me to use the full width of the road on entry and exit so I got a little better.

We had some excitement on saturday as we left service heading for the Savage River stage. We were all set and came into the first turn and stood on the brakes and a full bottle of gatorade went flying in under the brake pedal, so that was a scary moment. We drove the whole stage wit the bottle in under the pedals so we lost a bit of time. I’ll save everyone the trouble and call myself a massive tool for not securing the bottle…..

Going into service we had no problems and with two minutes left to get to the time control I went to start the car and nothing happened! We thought it was low on petrol so we pushed the car backwards through the service park and into time control and then into refuel. After still not starting, it was panic stations but Dasher and Dave found a faulty solonide on the kill switch and bypassed it and away we went 11 minutes late. We were really lucky it happened in service and not on the top of Savage River where we had lunch for two hours.

Sunday was brilliant – the best stages of the weekend and I had a blast driving on the tarmac. We had a big moment on Sunday (5m30s on the video clip) and I was thankful that the tyres found some grip and just barely pulled the car away from the rock bank.

So, that was our Rally Tasmania – I had a great weekend.

Thanks a million to Dasher and Dave for putting big hours in to get the car ready and all their advice on set up throughout the weekend. To my brother Paul for driving the service truck to Tassie and to Mick Ryan for his support and help with some parts we needed to get car ready in time.

from Rally Sport Magazine