Keith Cronin and Greg Shinnors fought some mechanical demons to take a start to finish victory in the Evo Challenge section of the Todds Leap Ulster International Rally. The Rally, which as a counting round of both the Irish Tarmac Championship and the British Rally Championship, had attracted the best drivers from the two islands to battle over the sixteen special stages, some of which were run in the dark.

They signalled their intent on Stage 1 when they took a 14.6 second lead in their category from Neil McCance, who was competing on his home event! This saw them slotting into 11th overall in the rally. On the second stage they did suffer a slight setback as the stage was cancelled due to an accident and they received the time of the last car to traverse the stage before the accident. This was about 20 sec slower than the time that they would have expected to complete the stage in. This time was, of course, queried with officials through normal channels but the official ruling was that the time should stand.

Friday evening also saw them suffer from differential worries and if it were not for David Bogie, who gave them his spare rear differential, they may not have been able to continue. They completed the evenings six stages unbeaten in their Evo category and were lying 13th overall at the overnight halt. They also had some suspension worries on Friday evening and without spare suspensions, a mishap could be costly but the team applied some super glue to the offending part and it duly completed the weekend.

Starting on Saturday with a two minute lead in the Evo Challenge one could have expected that a safe drive to the finish would have been in order, however this ultra competitive duo had other things in mind. Having recently started writing their own pacenotes and utilising just a two pass system (Write the notes on the first pass and then one other pass to check them), they needed to see how effective their notes really were for future reference. They were indeed fastest Evo challenger on the first six stages on Saturday to lead the category by over 3 minutes and a fine 10th overall in the Rally.

At this point in the rally it began to rain and it was immediately capitalised on, as the more powerful cars found it difficult to transfer the power to the road. Keith and Greg however had no such problems and they completed stage 12 just 2 seconds slower than current British Champion Guy Wilks and 1 second slower than multiple champion Mark Higgins. Towards the end of the next stage a problem developed with the differentials, which made the car very difficult to drive as it was behaving like a rear wheel drive. Although they were straight into service after this stage the team were unable to rectify the problem. This meant that they had to contend with a very unpredictable car for the final three stages and at that point it was more important to finish the rally and receive maximum Evo Points.

Although not able to attack the final three stages as they might have liked, they were still fastest of the Evo Challengers on each of them which meant that they were unbeaten on any of the fifteen competitive stages. This is something, which has not previously been achieved on the Evo Challenge. Neither has a 4m+ winning margin!!

With only one round remaining in this years Evo Challenge it is all very much to fight for. However, to become Evo Challenge Champion 2008, Keith has to win the final round in mid October, the Bulldog Rally and hope that other factors also fall into place. The commitment of the entire team cannot be questioned and most of Ireland is now shouting for them too!