Mason leads home trifecta

Richard Mason led home a Subaru one-two-three in the first round of the National Rally Championship (NRC) at Whangarei over the weekend. With his co-driving wife Sara, he finished nearly four minutes in front of Christchurch’s Matt Summerfield in a similar WRX STI. Nineteen-year-old Lance Williams from Te Aroha was third in an R4 version of the STI after two days of competition on back-country gravel roads. Mason, of Masterton, finished 11.2 seconds behind India’s Gaurav Gill, who won the event outright in a more potent Skoda Fabia S2000 as the event also served as the first round of the Asia Pacific Championship. “It’s good to get this monkey off our back,” says Mason, who had never won the Whangarei round of the national series before. On the morning stages, he thought the result might be in doubt when a rear-brake caliper started losing fluid. But he had a nearly three-minute buffer over Williams after Saturday’s racing. After his crew had remedied the problem at the mid-morning service stop, Mason sliced his way back up the field from seventh to second on the day and maintained his first overall position for the weekend. The drive of the event came from Williams, who only lost second place overall to Summerfield on the last day’s last stage when excessive tyre slowed him down. “The grip just went away halfway through the long last stage” says Williams, who decided a finish was more important than risking a crash. Some encouraging results in the WRX STI with which Hayden Paddon won the championship two years ago has seen him come to the fore. The car has been converted to the latest R4 specification over the summer and Williams had a flying start to his first national championship campaign. Summerfield was a model of consistency over the two days, to snare the runner-up position, while Sloan Cox and Phil Campbell who scored good results in today’s second heat, didn’t feature in Saturday’s results. Former world number-one female rally driver Emma Gilmour had teething problems with her Suzuki, but was pleased with the speed it showed when on-song despite coming 16th. She’s confident she and co-driver Ben Atkinson will be a force at the next round in Otago on May 10-11. “It was a bit of a shock grabbing fifth gear and having the gear stick come away in my hand,” she says. “We were pleased with the speed of the car and the tidier I drive it, the faster it goes.”