The Punto is ready for action!

Keith Cronin was unable to collect his 1st place prize in Banna on Sunday evening last as he still had some preparations to attend to in advance of Rally Scotland. The British Rally Champion then left his Ballylickey home early on Monday morning heading for Perthshire where he and Greg will spend Tuesday and part of Wednesday doing their reconnaissance of the stages.
On Wednesday evening they hope to get a further short test in the Abarth Punto that has been hired for the occasion.
Since early in the year plans were being made to contest Rally Scotland so that the team could test their pace against the regular IRC competitors. The original intention was to contest the event in their regular Mitsubishi. However, as the Cronin Motorsport team intend to contest a number of rounds of the IRC next season, it was decided that having won the British Rally Championship, they should get a taste of S2000 action prior to next year.
It took 10 days to get an acceptable deal put together for the hire of the PROCAR run Abarth Punto. A short testing session in Italy at the end of October was curtailed due to very heavy rainfall, so the crew will welcome another test before having to press into action against the current IRC champion Kris Meeke in his Peugeot, who is the number one seed. Seeded at number two is Guy Wilks, who was British Rally Champion in 2007 & 2008. He will drive a Skoda. Both of these will be very much the pacesetters as they have been competing in S2000 cars all season. Cronin and Shinnors are seeded at number 3 in the Punto, just ahead of Adam Gould who was awarded the BF Goodrich drive in a sister car to Meekes Peugeot.
Cronin welcomes the opportunity to compete at this level but knows that it will be a steep learning curve as the pace in these cars is much faster than the regular Group N cars.
Last weekend he commented “The most important thing for me in Scotland is to get mileage in the car to get used to the different driving style and then build my speed and hopefully set some competitive times.”