Gilmour and Searcy to shakedown for Tasmania at Battery Town Bay of Plenty Rally

With four weeks until she contests the Rally Tasmania, Emma Gilmour will head to this weekend’s Battery Town Rally Bay of Plenty to get some more mileage under her belt, ahead of her debut in the Australian event.

She will arrive at the one-day, Tauranga-based rally this Saturday, fresh off winning the Rally 4WD Class for the second consecutive year at the Ashley Forest Rallysprint in Canterbury last month, in her Vantage Windows & Doors Citroen C3.

For the Brian Green Property Group New Zealand Rally Championship’s (NZRC) penultimate round, Dunedin-based Emma will team up again with Australian co-driver Ben Searcy, who navigated for her earlier in the season.

“There’s a couple of reasons we are heading to the Bay of Plenty this weekend. Firstly, it’s a good shakedown for Ben and me before Tasmania, as it’s been five months since we’ve been in the car together.”

“We will cover a lot of competitive ground, with around 165km total over the 10 special stages, between Tauranga and Kawerau,” Emma says.

This year’s Bay of Plenty event also hosts an enticing challenge, featuring four fresh stages in an area that has not been rallied for over 20 years. The NZRC teams will visit some iconic stages in the Matahina Forest that were famous in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Rally organiser Dave Loughlin estimated that “very few of the top drivers will have experienced this forest.”

He added that the teams can expect traditional forestry tests but on roads that will hold up well.

“The roads are well drained and hard-based in most cases. We are using a mix of major forestry roads and some smaller roads to join them together. It is soft rolling country – not too steep,” he told the NZRC website.

Emma says the chance to rally on some roads that she hasn’t competed on in a long time was too good to miss.

“I’m excited about heading back to some old forestry roads that I haven’t driven on since I started rallying over two decades ago!”

The Battery Town Rally Bay of Plenty begins with a ceremonial start from 5.30pm on Friday at the Mitre 10 Mega in downtown Tauranga, before a full day of action on Saturday.