This Saturday’s Enniskillen Clubmans Rally features
stages over the asphalt drives of Lough Navar and has a
competitive 2 wheel drive entry. Just some of the top
drivers m include Stewart Clarke, Gary McElhinney,
Trevor Lancashire and Damien Toner in Escorts. Rodney
White makes the trip from Crumlin and will drive his
Sunbeam Lotus. Fintan McGrady has his Escort sorted
again, and Mervyn Wedlock is out in a new Escort Mk2.
Alan Cathcart has entered in a new Civic Type R, Paul
McShea will drive his Orion and Ron Neely is making a
return in his daughter’s Peugeot. Sean Treacy and Kieran
O’Neill have entered the historics class, but because
there are only a couple of historic entries Clerk of the
Course Declan Gannon may well amalgamate them with
another class. Scrutiny for the rally is in Enniskillen
mart on Friday evening and the event starts from
Derrygonnelly on Saturday morning.
Despite retiring towards the end of the Cork ‘20’, Kevin
O’Donoghue has retained his lead in the 023 Tiles
Southern 4 Championship. However, with one round
remaining, the Fastnet (28th Oct.), Kevin has just 2
points in hand over Mark Nangle, with Kevin Kelleher a
further 6 back. The actual totals are O’Donoghue 49,
Nangle 48, Kelleher 42. If Kevin scores on the Fastnet
and wants to add that to his total, he will have to drop
one previous score, as will Nangle and Kelleher. Tim
McNulty and Michael Barrable, both of whom may well be
doing the Fastnet, are also possibles for the title,
McNulty with 39 points, Barrable 38, and neither has to
drop a score.
The Donegal Harvest, based at the new An Grianan Hotel
on the main Derry to Letterkenny Road, has a high
profile top entry despite not being a round of the
Dunlop National Championship. The rally is a round of
the class based Border Championship. Several drivers,
including Gareth MacHale and Tim McNulty, are planning
to compete, to stay match fit for Rally Ireland. They
will join top Donegal men such as Paul Harris, Hugh
Martin Doherty and P.J.McDermott. The rally bucks the
National trend by running on a Saturday (13th Oct).
There are eight stages, with service on the road from
Burt towards Buncrana.
Billy Coleman Award winner Owen Murphy had a great race
with Colm Murphy for GpN honours on the Cork ‘20’, but
unfortunately Owen got caught out on mud/gravel over a
bump crest and crashed out. Owen and his father Jerry
are in the process of getting the car sorted and plan to
pull out all the stops to try and compete on Rally
Ireland.
Lisburn’s Phillip Morrow takes his Lancer to the
Trackrod Rally in Yorkshire this weekend hopeful of a
decent result to clinch the Evo Challenge series, even
with one round remaining. Taking a break from his oil
deliveries, Phillip commented, “Everything seems good,
but I’m trying not to think too much about the
Championship. The stages will be new to me. They are
all running in different directions to anything I’ve
done before. We only need one 5th place, 6 points, from
either of the two rallies to win the title. Sebastien
Ling needs two outright wins to beat me. We have
‘Superally’ to fall back on if everything goes wrong,
which should get a few points. But we’re not going to
try and race the BRC boys. The stages aren’t technical.
They are fast, but I’ll concentrate on just keeping the
car in the middle of the road. We have the car well
prepared since the Ulster, looked at every angle. It is
all maintenance lifing of all the bits, trying to
eliminate any possibility of failure, of something
breaking and letting us down. I’ll do my normal thing
over the first couple of stages, and then see how we go,
stay close. Maybe next year I’ll be able to race the BRC
guys in a ‘works’ car!”
Other Irish drivers in the main Rally Yorkshire entry
list include young Darren Gass, Connor McCloskey, Daniel
Barry from Wicklow, Alan Carmichael, and Martin Laverty
in his Citroen C2. McCloskey, Barry and Carmichael are
in Lancers, while Gass is in his Citroen C2 Super 1600
and this will be his first run in the car on a gravel
round of the BRC. Darren has changed all the suspension
and upgraded the engine. The engine is being rebuilt in
France and won’t be here until the last minute, so
Darren will have little chance of a test.
Brian Patterson.
