Strong Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy performance in Canaries
The Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy crew of Jon Armstrong and Eoin Treacy recorded their best result of the FIA European Rally Championship season so far by taking a deserved seventh place in Rally Islas Canarias over the weekend.
The all-tarmac rally was the second round of the 2024 campaign and the M-Sport Ford Fiesta Rally2 crew improved on their eighth place on Rally Hungary in April.
They were sixth overall after Friday’s opening day but an intercom issue on Saturday cost them valuable time but also allowed them to show their ingenuity.
“We started well on Saturday and we were setting top five times from the get-go. That was really good as we were trading times with all the frontrunners,” explained Treacy.
“The margins were still tight on Sunday morning, then we had an intercom issue so we had to resort to shouting and hand signals. We had a strong finish in the PowerStage and finished sixth on that it was a very strong weekend and we are very happy.”
Such was their pace over the weekend the Irish team finished just behind reigning FIA European Rally Champion Hayden Paddon and held off a late event charge by Mads Ostberg, a multiple-event winner at this level. Just two seconds was the margin between seventh and eighth place after nearly 200 km of competition.
Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy driver Aoife Raftery has moved into third place in the FIA Junior Rally Championship after another strong performance on Rally Islas Canarias.
The Craughwell-based driver is in her second year of FIA European Rally Championship competition.
After a career-best fourth-place finish in Hungary in April she arrived at the Spanish event in the same position in the championship’s standings.
The only female driver in the Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy prefers gravel roads and loose surfaces as opposed to the challenging asphalt on offer in Gran Canaria.
She had to adapt her driving style to cope with the relentless amount of corners on each stage and spent the day learning the nuances of roads that are paved with lava.
The sensible approach netted dividends and by finishing ninth overall (out of 14 starters) she scored the FIA Junior Rally Championship for the second event in a row.
The two top-ten results in a row mean that the Peugeot 208 Rally4 driver leaves the Canary Islands in third place in the championship.
“We always knew coming to the Canaries that we would not have the same speed on this specialised tarmac as we had on the gravel roads in Hungary. The target was to finish the rally, the top ten finish was great and it is even better that we are now third in the championship as it returns to my preferred gravel in Sweden in June,” she said at the finish line in Gran Canaria on Sunday evening.
Raftery, who was co-driven by Antrim’s Hannah McKillop was the leading female driver in the event too.
