Canberra has bookended two consecutive rounds of the Australian Rally Championship in 2023-24, ending this season next month and opening the next.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The double lock-in of the biggest motorsport event in the ACT presents a strong opportunity for the Canberra-based Neal Bates Motorsport team, which arguably has the fastest rally cars and drivers in the country, to continue their successful run of recent seasons.
The Bates team, including reigning Australian champion Lewis and his older brother, Harry, set off for South Australia this week for the penultimate round of the championship.
Lewis Bates currently leads the championship with 262 points to his brother's 223.
The Bates siblings, in their Canberra-built Toyota Gazoo Racing Yaris cars, have dominated the championship in the past five years.
Harry Bates and co-driver Coral Taylor clawed their way back into championship contention with a 7.9 sec win in the Gippsland Rally in Victoria in late August.
Testing for the lightning-fast Adelaide Hills Rally starts on Thursday. The rally, which has 53 entries, will be held over the coming weekend and the ACT drivers will be seeded first and second for the upcoming event.
READ MORE:
The Adelaide event also marks the return to the series of 2017 national champion Molly Taylor in a Subaru Impreza. Taylor, seeded to start in position six, has also flagged her intention to compete in Canberra next month as the local event welcomes back Subaru as its major sponsor.
The Clerk of Course for the Subaru Rally of Canberra, Adrian Dudok, said that the November event would run in a two-heat formula, with points awarded for each day's competition.
"We will be running the first day on stages to the west of Canberra, and the following day in the Kowen forest," he said.
"One of the major concerns with holding an event like this so late in the year is, of course, the fire issue.
"We always have fire control crews at the start of every stage but this year we have opened negotiations with the ACT Rural Fire Service and we hope to have an RFS unit stationed at the start control of every stage to ameliorate that risk.
"The critical element for staging the rally is if there is a total fire ban called. That's always a risk holding an event late in the year here. If one is called, then we would have to abandon the event."
He said that entries had opened for the Canberra rally and he expected the entry numbers to ramp up quickly after Adelaide.
Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:
- Bookmark canberratimes.com.au
- Download our app
- Make sure you are signed up for our breaking and regular headlines newsletters
- Follow us on Twitter
- Follow us on Instagram