Motorsport: Super-fast Mason wins Rotorua International Rally

The country's fastest woman rally driver, Emma Gilmour, shows how it's done in the rain.

National rally champion Richard Mason came from behind to beat Australian titleholder Cody Crocker to win the Rotorua International Rally.

The event doubled as a round of the Asia Pacific and national championships.

Crocker put light years between himself and his Asia Pacific rivals, while Masterton's Mason won both heats of the national series.

Crocker, who has won the Australian title for the past three years, finished 8.9 seconds behind Mason after 265km of special stages.

Mason took over the lead with a blistering time through the 19km stage 10 of the 12 stages when he beat Crocker by 17.8 seconds to turn an 11.1 seconds deficit into a 6.7 seconds advantage.

The pair were both driving Subaru Impreza WRX STIs, as were third and fourth-placed Sam Murray (Palmerston North) and Todd Bawden (Auckland), cementing another Subaru clean sweep of the top placings.

In Sunday's second heat of the national championship, Mason led home Murray and Bawden by more than a minute.

Former national champion Chris West had a weekend he and the Winger Motorsport team would rather forget. After the turbo blew on the final stage of Saturday's first heat, he restarted on Sunday morning with a new turbocharger fitted, but withdrew after two stages rather than risk engine damage.

"We knew we might not make it through the day," West said. "The motor didn't feel quite right from the first stage. But we had to give it a go for the championship points."

The team believes the initial damage to the turbo may have been caused by the ingestion of water in the Motu stage on Saturday morning.

The retirements in both heats have pushed West back to sixth in the championship standings.

He started the event tied for first, on points, with Mason.

"We've been in worst positions in the past," West said. "Once I got used to the new centre diff settings the pace was certainly there. Now we've just got to focus on the Whangarei event and the rest of the season."

The victory was Mason's first in an international event and Murray's first podium finish at an international level.

Emma Gilmour holds fourth place in the New Zealand championship, despite having to overcome a series of problems to finish the second round.

As if wet, slippery roads were not enough of a challenge, the country's fastest woman rally driver also had to contend with a faulty centre differential on her Subaru.

The net result - three punctures and four spins over two days - meant Gilmour was unable to repeat her blistering form from the championship-opening Otago rally earlier in the month.

Even so, by soldiering on to finish 10th in the national field on day one and fifth on day two, she scored sufficient national points to slip just one place in the championship standings, to fourth overall.

"It was one of those weekends when things definitely did not go the way we planned," Gilmour said.

"Conditions were miserable on Saturday, and I was certainly sick of changing tyres by the end of the day.

"Then from Sunday's very first stage it was apparent things were still not right with the differential.

"The next stage it was fine at the start, but then it played up again, the car started to go very sideways, and we had a spin."

Faced with a problem that came and went at first, and then worsened later in the event, Gilmour says it was not possible to drive with the confidence she would have liked.

By the final stages her main focus was on finishing rather than setting competitive times through the special stages.

"I'm not one to make excuses, but I actually think Cobby (co-driver Chris Cobham) and I did really well simply to finish," Gilmour said.

"Things were getting pretty hairy at times and it would have been very easy to throw it all away. "At the end, we felt like we had done two or three rallies, not just one."