Rally record in sight

Richard and Sara Mason have the record books in their sights after their near perfect winning effort in the Trust House Racetech Rally of Wairarapa over the weekend.

Victory meant Richard Mason became only the second driver in New Zealand Rally Championship history to have won 20 rounds of that competition and three more will see him overtake record holder Neil Allport. And wife Sara has moved up the co-driver rankings to be tied for second on 17 wins with Rob Ryan.

Richard Mason said the bettering of Allport's record had been on his mind for some time and, the closer he got, the more determined he had become to overhaul it.

However, he knows only too well the perils of predicting what will happen from one rally to the next, let alone further down the track.

"It's definitely within reach now but rallying is the sort of sport where you can't guarantee anything. We'll just take things as they come and hope it happens sooner than later." Mason's latest Wairarapa win was his seventh in that rally - a record in itself - and his one-minute advantage over Dunedin's Emma Gilmour represented one of his most comfortable victories, in terms of margin and manner.

"It was a good rally for us, pretty much everything went according to plan," Mason said. "We didn't really get into any trouble at all and that's a nice change."

Up by more than 30secs after Saturday's stages, the Masons adopted a slightly more conservative approach on the Sunday with the challenge being to get their BNT Subaru to the finish in one piece while still holding their closest rivals at bay.

"I don't know why it is but we always tend to do better on the first day and I guess that was always in the back of our minds too.

"It was more about defending the lead than going as quick as we possibly could."

As it happened, the Masons needn't have worried as, at rally's end, they had won nine of the 16 stages, earning 41 out of a possible 42 national championship points, leaving them two points adrift of Alex Kelsey of Coromandel heading into the Rally of Otago on May 25-27.