The George Derrick Memorial Trial was held on 26 April.
VRC Round 3 – 1980 CCRMIT George Derrick Memorial Trial
On behalf of the CCRMIT, director Steve Hollowood ran an excellent event for a very competitive field of VRC competitors, plus a couple of crews from South Australia.
The Rally started in Echuca and consisted of a daylight division in the Perricoota Forest and a night division around Mathoura.
Hugh Bell in his Datsun 1600 was performing impressively setting consistent fastest times. He was well navigated by the car’s owner Tony Allen. So too were Ed Ordinski and Lyndon Wilson, well placed in their Mazda RX 2 until they were forced out with a broken exhaust and then overheating.
Heavy rain in the preceding week made roads slippery and many crews had trouble with the conditions. Bumping into trees caused retirements for a few, including Gil Davis / David Long and Shane Blandford / Ron Harper, both in Datsuns, whilst John Albanis blew a head gasket and retired.
After the daylight, Hugh Bell was well out in front with more than four minutes to last round winners, Chris and Simon Brown. Rex Muldoon was in third, closely followed by Wall, Uttleymore, Moll with Smith back in seventh, but only a little more than a minute back from second.
After the mealbreak came five tricky stages to the east of Mathoura and two more down to the finish outside of Echuca. The last of the Mathoura stages (SS16) meandered around some sand dunes with many tight calls keeping the navigators busy. One instruction caused some drama with several of the leaders “falling off the route chart”. Worst affected was Rex Muldoon / Gary Gourlay who dropped more than 20 minutes and fell from contention. The Browns may have also wrong slotted, dropping 5 extra minutes.
The penultimate stage south through the Moira Forest had a wrong instruction and was deleted from the results.
After the event, the director used his discretion to delete the troublesome SS16 and while High Bell / Tony Allen were clear winners, this placed the Browns second, Smith/ Paterson third and Muldoon / Gourlay fourth.
A subsequent protest was upheld, ruling that there was no basis for the deletion of SS16, and so the final results were as below.
