Motorsport: Rally NZ officials face nervous times

An erupting volcano in Iceland is giving motor Rally of New Zealand organisers nervous moments ahead of the May 6-9 event, based in Auckland.

Ash from the volcano has closed air space over Europe, and there could be a financial knock-on effect that reaches as far as the New Zealand rally.

Nearly 100 members of World Rally Championship (WRC) teams who competed in Turkey last weekend have had to make a marathon and costly bus coach trip back to their base in northern England.

Andrew Wheatley, business development manager at the M-Sport operation that prepares and runs the works BP Ford Abu Dhabi team as well as the Stobart and Munchi's outfits, told Reuters beating the ash would cost serious cash.

"What would normally have been a £500 (NZ$1079) trip is going to cost £1500," he said.

"So if you multiply that by 88 passengers, you end up with a considerable amount of costs involved.

"By far our bigger issue is that our next event (in New Zealand) is coming in three weeks and this pushes our schedule into a difficult situation to try and be able to achieve those targets," he said.

Wheatley said mechanics from their three teams were expected to arrive at home base on Thursday if they could not get some on flights at points along the route before then.

That would leaving them just a week to get the cars stripped down and rebuilt before they had to be back at London's Heathrow airport on the following Thursday for the flight to New Zealand.

"About 50 per cent of our kit is already in New Zealand, it arrived by sea freight, which is unaffected, but the cars, the people and the last-minute equipment start leaving a week on Friday," he said.

"All the equipment and the cars will be at Heathrow a week on Thursday and that's really when the crucial time comes for the next rally," he said.

"If they are still struggling with freight and transfer movements at that time then obviously our participation in the event is compromised and that would be catastrophic for our business."

Rally New Zealand chairman Chris Carr said he anticipated a nervous wait over the next week or so.

He had been keeping a vigil over a virtual radar of flights over Europe.

"I can see that from having no planes on it from yesterday, there's a lot of planes today.

"At this point, I have no reason to think the event won't happen but obviously the result of the ash in Europe is stopping the people returning from the last event in Turkey over the weekend and so it is restricting the work time to get their preparations done."

Most of the teams had shipped a lot of equipment by sea freight and about 50-60 tonnes are due to arrive on May 2.

Some of the Production World Rally Championship cars were already in the country.

The main concern was over air travel and air freight for "the people, all of the television and timing equipment as well as probably the top 10 cars containing the latest technological developments".

Carr shuddered to think what might happen if the disruption continued.

"There's very little that anyone can do - it's an act of God and there's nothing anybody can do to change things.

"It will be very damaging - lots and lots of preparations have been put into place. I would think it highly unlikely the event would be called off but it would be run at a different level if the leading participants didn't come here."

Carr said the decision on air freight would have to be made by next Friday afternoon, London time.

"I imagine the very latest we could leave it before things arrive would be May 5. If things left Europe by end of Friday, May 2, I wouldn't have any concerns."

- NZPA