Conor Mohan along with Eamonn Kelly have scored their third overall win in the Junior section of the British Rally Championship. The pair finished the Get Connected Rali Ceredigion, round 5 of the championship with a 49.3 second advantage over fellow Irish men and closest championship rivals Kyle White/Sean Topping. The rally began on Friday with two passes of the Aberystwyth street stage (SS1, SS2) before heading into the proper closed road stages which were to be contested in the dark. After SS2 Kelly/Mohan lay 1s behind White/Topping, but out on the proper stages, Kelly went 9.2s faster on the 5.31km SS3 Glan yr Afon to take the over night lead due to the final stage being cancelled because of an earlier accident.Day two consisted of a further eight stages. And immediately Kelly/Mohan ran into trouble. Half way through SS5, the longest of the event, they had an impact with a wall which resulted in a bent rear axle on their Rally4 Ford Fiesta. Luckily the damage wasn’t terminal, and they managed to complete the following three stages and amazingly with three stage winning times to hold a 36s lead at midday service.
On SS9, a repeat run over the stage they had their earlier accident on, Kelly/Mohan scored an astonishing stage win by over 20s to extend their lead to just shy of a minute. On the following stage they would however drop 5.1s to White/Topping after suffering a puncture four corners from the stage end. Having left final service with only one spare tyre they sensibly backed off over the final two stages to reduce the risk of last minute drama and secured the rally win and more importantly the Junior British Rally Championship for Eamonn. Eamonn secured the win thanks to a well selected ‘Joker’ round at the Jim Clark Rally. A ‘Joker’ round is where a driver can select an event to score a max of 5 bonus points providing, they win the event. On the Jim Clarke, Eamonn and Conor did indeed score the overall win, meaning Eamonn came away with a full 30 points rather than the usual 25. Closest rival Kyle White selected the Grampian Forest Rally as his ‘Joker’ event, but would fail to make the finish and thus sored no event points or bonus points. Eamonn currently has 116 points and even with two more rounds to take place, he cannot be beaten due to the championship having two dropped scores, where the competitor disregards their two lowest points hauls. Strangely, the ‘Joker’ rounds don’t count for navigators meaning that despite Conor navigating for Eamonn for the entire championship, he has not secured the championship win. With two rounds still to take place, Conor needs to finish ahead of Sean Topping on just one of the two remaining rounds to secure the Navigators title. Arthur Kierans guided Alan Carmichael to their fourth win in the BRC National Rally Championship finishing the event with almost a 3:30s advantage over 2nd place Craig Jones/Ian Taylor.
