Inverness duo pick up end of season prizes
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DOUGAL Brown and Lewis Rochford finished the Scottish Rally Championship on a high with notable successes for the Inverness pairing.
Brown secured seventh in the overall drivers championship, but won the Group N class and the Mitsubishi Scottish Cup, while Rochford was the first Group N co-driver and runner-up in the SRC Junior category having come sixth overall on the co-drivers leaderboard.
Competing at the final event of the season — the Colin McRae Forest Stages — Brown and Rochford made steady progress from the start and were just outside the top 10 placings when a puncture on stage three halted them in their tracks.
With eight stage miles still to go the crew made the decision to stop and change the wheel to avoid risking any damage to the car, or worse still, potentially crashing as a result from driving on a puncture.
The lost time dropped Brown and Rochford down to 47th place and it looked like the team would be so far down the finishing
order that they would not score any points in the overall championship.
There was, however, still class-award points to be won, so the aim for the pair soon became to finish the rally with no further troubles and salvage what they could from the event.
Brown and Rochford put in a sterling performance throughout the final three stages and they worked their way back up the order to finish 18th overall and third in class.
This gave the duo enough points to secure the Group N driver and co-drivers championship, which was their goal at the start of the 2012 season.
For the next campaign, Brown and Rochford have decided to move up to the open class for and will be aiming for some top five finishes against the best of Scotland’s rallying talent.
Elsewhere at the Colin McRae Rally, Inverness crew Donnie Macdonald and Andrew Falconer finished fifth overall in their Mitsubishi Evo, but a non-finish for city co-driver Paul Beaton alongside Euan Thorburn.
There was, however better news for another Inverness co-driver as Steven Brown helped Martin Craik to ninth place overall.
MacDonald ended the season as the top driver from the Highland Capital, taking sixth place in standings, just ahead of Brown, while John Morrison (Conon Bridge) was 10th.
Beaton was third overall in the co-drivers championship, two places in front Falconer, who ended the season one on front of Rochford.
