1998 Rally of New Zealand

24 - 27 July 1998

Before you get too excited the Rally of NZ wasn’t organised by the MR2 Owners Club but I don’t think we could have got the result any better had we been in charge.

This rally wasn’t even an official club gathering... it just worked out that way. Friday night Ade, Steve, Brad, Richard and myself met at the Manukau Super Stage. We’d arrived in separate cars so some navigation by cellphone was required at first. The weather was about as bad as I’ve experienced at a motorsport event but that didn’t deter us and a few thousand others from standing in ankle deep mud under heavy rain being blinded by spot lights while listening to the worst sports commentary since the ancient Olympics.

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This vehicle was used for ‘testing’

To say it wasn’t a good start would be an understatement but it was about to get much better. On the way back to our cars we stopped off at ‘Parc Ferme’ where the rally cars are held overnight. Sainz and his followers arrived soon after, so we had a close-up look at the WRC Corollas. Richard paid attention to every detail in the hope of finding something that he could bolt onto his GT-Four while the rest of us were mesmerised by the dash board display. When the Corolla was put into gear a crunch worthy of the oldest Massey-Fergussen could be heard and the LCD on the dash came to life with the giant 1. Forget all your boost gauges and temperature readouts this has to be the ultimate in in-car-entertainment.

Saturday morning saw Brad, Richard and myself head off to the Maramarua Forest in Richard’s GT-Four. We were a bit late for all the road closures so some walking was required. In fact I haven’t walked so much since I drove a Ford, but we made it to Stage 2 in time to see most of the top cars. Those that we missed came by soon after as the same stretch of road was being used for Stage 4. We’d been spectating on a long straight which was spectacular but made the photos a bit more difficult so we moved on to Stage 5 in search of some corner action. Although I’m pretty biased towards Toyota the sound of the works Escorts had an influence on my vocabulary for the rest of the day.... buuurrrrr, BANG, buuurrrrrrrr, BANG.

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The cars were back in Auckland at around 3pm after a pretty short day by rallying standards. We next saw them at the old Ford car assembly plant in Wiri where a service park had been set up. There would have been billions of dollars in spare parts and tools on site. Richard even managed to source an entire GT-Four rally car from Ross Meekings but it wouldn’t fit in the boot and we forgot we were surrounded by car transporters. The rally teams do some major repairs in a very short time making the scene look like an F1 pit stop that lasts for a whole hour.

Sunday the action was up at Maungaturoto and it was an early start for me alone. Richard’s brain was full of technical data and Brad’s attraction to the giant 1 had worn off. It was time to leave my comfort zone, riding in a GT-Four, and see what an MR2 is like at rally chasing. The game of rally chasing is quite simple. You have to beat Carlos Sainz in a race around the countryside and he gets all the short cuts. The end result is that you don’t have a chance of seeing all the stages... so you preselect carefully what stages you’ll watch according to the timetable. Then you arrive at your first destination to find out it’s flooded and throw out your plan for the rest of the day.

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Despite the flooding the weather was actually improving and my first viewing point took in a few hundred meters of Stage 13 including four corners. Plenty to keep a rally fan happy for an hour or two. While waiting for the start a helicopter arrived with spectators who obviously took the game of rally chasing a bit too seriously, their camera gear alone was worth more than my MR2 (market value, not sentimental value). The first cars soon arrived and promptly showered me with muddy gravel but it’s actually a nice feeling when you think that the kinetic energy of those stones was derived from a 300hp 3S-GTE.

I visited a couple more stages that afternoon just to make sure I got completely muddy then headed for home. A major slip had reduced SH1 to a single lane in one place which caused a 10km traffic jam but after a full day of rally chasing the change of pace was welcome.

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Monday morning I was too tired to go to work so I got up at 6am and drove 200km to Raglan, the site of the last day of the rally. The first stages of the day, 19 & 20, required spectators to drive on metal roads. No problem, my MR2 had handled 100km of just such roads the day before. In this case though ‘metal road’ wasn’t an accurate description as it soon became a farm track, a very muddy and deeply rutted farm track. I made it to the queue of parked cars after bottoming out a few times and found I still had to walk another 1km to the spectating point. This stage wasn’t even very exciting and definitely not worth the unknown damage to my car, but at least I can say I was there. The organisers should have been selling T-shirts with ‘I Survived Stage 20’ on them.

My final stage of the rally made up for all the mud and rain and walking of the previous three days. The weather was fine, the road was even dusty, and from where I was standing I could see 2km of the finest rallying roads in the country. Across the valley the first Corolla’s dust trail was visible well before its exhaust note could be heard. In an unnaturally short time Sainz had his Toyota flying past me just a few feet away and I had another photo for my album.

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After half the field had passed the rally cars were getting noticeably slower, these guys were just trying to finish and I knew how they felt. I was heading back to my ever patient MR2 when I saw Donel Svendson in his blue Supercharger. His car looked as dirty as mine so I guess he also deserved one of the ‘Stage 20’ T-shirts. Apart from a couple of MR2s surviving the ‘long course’, Toyotas featured highly in the official results, Sainz and Auriol took 1st and 2nd and two more Corollas finished in the top ten.

While rallying may seem like an odd sport when the total amount of action can be as little as 30mins for a whole days ‘spectating’ you have to realise that getting to some of these places is half the fun... especially when you’re in an MR2.

Malcolm Cambridge