Back to the future for rally champs

Masterton rally ace Richard Mason and co-driver and wife Sara will contest the 2015 Rally of Wairarapa in the same Subaru in which he won the race a decade ago.

Richard Mason has made the Rally of Wairarapa pretty much his own - taking out the title seven times.

So the news that the Masterton ace and co-driver and wife Sara will be lining up again in the 2015 edition would normally spell disaster for other combinations.

Only this time it will be different, majorly so.

The Masons will not be competing in the Subaru in which they have dominated the New Zealand Rally Championship. Last year, for instance, they won five of the six rounds and had the national spoils in the bag with two rounds to spare. It was a victory which had the Masons blitzing the record books.

For Richard Mason, it was his fifth NZRC title, the most for any driver in the history of the event.

It was a similar story for the individual rounds he had won, 28, while Sara Mason's 25 round wins made her the most successful NZRC so-driver ever.

Staggeringly, however, not even a curriculum vitae of those remarkable proportions was enough to have the Masons making another full-on tilt at this year's NZRC.

Their major sponsor pulled out and, despite strenuous efforts to find a replacement, they were unable to do so. Initially, there were still hopes they might manage to make the starting line in a couple of the earlier rounds but fate - or more correctly mechanical problems - conspired against them and now the Rally of Wairarapa will be their sole appearance.

But while they will still be competing in a Subaru, it won't be the flying machine which has served them so well in the past. Rather it will be the car in which Mason won his first national title in 2005, including a victory in the Rally of Wairarapa.

"I guess you could say we've had to take a step backwards but that's the way things have panned out," he said yesterday. "It'll be just nice to be out there competing again, we're really looking forward to it."

Mason does concede, however, that the change of car will almost certainly mean slower times and consequently chalking up another success on home territory was clearly no given.

"We'll be going out there with the idea of winning but it's going to be a challenge."

Meanwhile, Sara Mason is heading to Auckland this weekend as one of 20 women featuring at the Women in Motorsport promotion at the CRC Speedshow.

Others include Jessi Combs, the American labelled the "fastest woman in the world" after piloting the land speed record car, the North American Eagle, to a top speed of 780km/h in Alvord Desert in 2013.