Ballarat rally car driver Ross Stapleton can’t wait for his home-town car contest where everything will be familiar and he can sleep in his own bed.
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The Courier Eureka Rally next weekend, the first round of the 2018 Australian Rally Championship, will feature three local faces – Mr Stapleton, his navigator Peter Ellis, and fellow driver Braeden Kendrick.
Mr Stapleton, 44, has been driving rally cars since he was 18 after growing up attending events with his rally-driving dad Peter. He estimates he’s driven about 115 to 120 rallies across Australia.
“I’ve done track racing and drags and hill climbs and all that kind of motorsport but I enjoy time in the car and some of those forms of motorsport are over within minutes. With rally driving, at the end of the day you really feel like you’ve done something, spent time in the car.”
Mr Stapleton is going over his rally car with a fine-toothed comb in the lead up to the Eureka Rally – his first for the year.
“It’s mainly cleaning and getting everything organised and going over things 20 times to make sure everything’s right. It’s a big event and you want to make sure you get through.”
In last year’s Eureka Rally, a punctured tyre cost him dearly, putting him out of contention.
This year The Courier Eureka Rally will see crews tackle 16 special forest stages across the weekend through the eastern Wombat State Forest, and in the forests south of Ballarat between Buninyong and Linton.
Geoff Boyd from the Ballarat Light Car Club said motorsport had a rich history in Ballarat, going back to the 1950s when there was motor racing at Ballarat Airport. The airport again figures in motorsport in 2018, with the Eureka Rally’s service park and rally office based there.
Mr Boyd said the BLCC stepped in last year to run the Victorian leg of the Australian Rally Championship, later named the Eureka Rally, after the previous car club that had run the Victorian heat could no longer continue.
“If Ballarat didn’t put its hand up we would have missed out on having a heat in Victoria, which would have been very sad for the state,” he said.
There are 50 cars and crews entered in to next week’s rally.
WIN A HOT LAP
The Courier has teamed up with Eureka Rally to give you the chance to experience the thrill of a hot lap with a leading rally car driver through the Ross Creek Forest.
On March 3 and 4, The Courier Eureka Rally returns to the streets and forests around Ballarat. Cars and drivers will cover about 600km across the weekend in round one of the 2018 Australian Rally Championship.
If you’ve always wanted to tick rally racer off your bucket list, visit this link to enter
