Hawkes Bay Rally. 2009.

Being just a Club Rally Driver here in New Zealand, means a lot of organising, preparation, and chasing the “Sponsorship Dollar”, is done sometimes entirely by the car owner themselves. I have been very lucky over the years to have been able to have a great team of sponsors get behind me and help run this small team to enable some amazing results at times. Surprising ourselves a lot of the times!!

Enter Ben Harding.

Previous owner of this chassis many moons ago, he achieved some amazing results in the Central Region Rally series in its hey day, when Rallys here in New Zealand regularly had over 100 entries at every event. A very talented Motocross rider, successful businessman, and equally capable Co-Driver.

Upon my regular Co-Driver Andrew Hughes being busy, a chance phone call to Ben turned into an amazing event for the team.

Not only did we have an absolute ball of fun throughout the weekend, we converted that into one of the best results TMAC Racing has ever achieved! It was a National Rally Championship round and though not eligible for points we finished 6th Overall in the Rally from 60 starters, 1st in class and 1st 2WD car!

Hence the chance photograph above from the LEGEND “SCOTT JOHNSON”.

These good times are hard to produce and at the time, we take for granted…

Cheers Ben…