The Rally of Melbourne, directed by Glenn Cuthbert, was held on August 14 and 15.
Australian Rally Championship Round 4
Victorian Rally Championship Round 3
This should have been a showdown between the two WRC cars, the Corolla of Neal Bates and Coral Taylor, and the Subaru WRX of Possum Bourne and Craig Vincent. But things didn’t go to plan for either of the contenders. Bates rolled the Corolla onto its roof on the second stage, and despite leading by two and a half minutes, Bourne slid into a tree stump on the day’s penultimate stage on the icy and snow covered Ben Cairn Road. The Subaru was unable to start the next day, but the Bates Corolla was repaired and went on to win the second heat by more than 2 minutes.
Honours in the first heat went to Cody Crocker and Greg Foletta in the Group N Subaru with Ed Ordynski and Iain Stewart a mere 3 seconds behind in their Lancer. Ordynski upped the pace to place second in Heat 2, more than a minute ahead of Crocker.
The Victorian Championship round went to Simon and Sue Evans in their Golf GTi, placing sixth and fifth outright on the two heats, also taking the 2WD win. Some of the main VRC contenders struck problems. Scott Pedder and Paul Humm had electrical gremlins on the first heat but finished second to Evans on the second heat ahead of novice driver Craig Dawson with Brian Tiedemann who took their Nissan Pulsar to fantastic eighth outright on Heat 1 but could only manage eighteenth and sixth VRC on Heat 2. Previous round winner, Darren Windus (with Geoff Floyd) dropped a heap of time on SS2 and finished well out of the points on Heat 1 but recovered to finish just in the points on Heat 2. Good placing by Sam Vaughan (with Justin Hunt) propelled him into the joint lead in the VRC. Half points were awarded for each heat.
