Round 8: Trackrod Rally, Pickering, 26th September 2009

Making a welcome return to the 2009 Pirelli MSA Gravel Rally Championship for his local event, Charlie Payne (Ripon) and co-driver Craig Thorley (Pocklington) just managed to scrape victory on the final round of the series in this weekend's Trackrod Rally.

It was Alan Cookson (Saltash) and Julian Wilkinson (Wandsworth) in their Friesian-liveried Subaru WRC who topped the leaderboard after the first stage, stopping the clocks exactly sixteen seconds ahead of the Mitsubishi Lancer WRC of Payne and Thorley. A spin in stage two saw Cookson and Wilkinson drop fifteen seconds when they had trouble with gear selection allowing Payne to claim a stage victory.

Payne managed to clinch the next two stage victories closely followed by the hard charging Subaru of Cookson and as they entered the final stage of the day Cookson had the slimmest of leads, just eight tenths of a second.

Payne pulled out all the stops on the final stage of the day, the very fast Langdale stage, stopping the clocks eight seconds ahead of Cookson which was enough for them to claim overall victory. However the points Cookson and Wilkinson claimed for second overall were enough to move them ahead of Paul Bird to take sixth overall in the Championship.

Results

1 Charlie PAYNE/Craig THORLEY, Mitsubishi Lancer - 0:41:14.52 Alan COOKSON/Julian WILKINSON, Subaru Impreza WRC 0:41:21.83 Stephen PETCH/Michael WILKINSON, Mitsubishi Evo 9 0:43:31.7

Final Championship

1 Marcus Dodd 119 (champion)2 Steve Perez 1123 Daniel Barry 1024= Simon Hughes 94= Nik Elsmore 946 Alan Cookson 887 Paul Bird 688 Owen Murphy 659 Wug Utting 47 10= Alan Carmichael 43= Charlie Payne 43