BCIC RB24 winner Maloney places sixth in UK rally

BCIC Rally Barbados 2024 winner and reigning Barbados Rally Club Champion Driver Stuart Maloney finished sixth last Saturday (January 18) in the MGJ Engineering Brands Hatch Winter Stages, fourth of nine rounds in the UK’s Protyre Circuit Rally Championship (CRC). The event was won by 2023/24 CRC Champion Michael Igoe, with former Champions Barry Morris, John Griffiths and Chris West, plus current points-leader John Stone the only other drivers to beat Maloney.
  Off-season racetrack-based events in the UK provide a chance for Caribbean competitors to shake down newly-acquired cars: in 2023, Paul Horton of the Turks & Caicos Rally Team entered Brands Hatch in his Citroen C3 Rally2 before shipping the car to Barbados, while America’s George Sherman did the same last year with his Ford Fiesta Rally2, then finished 10th this year. Jamaica’s Tarik Minott (Fiesta Rally2) finished 16th in the Christmas Stages at Croft in December and was also at Brands Hatch.
  Maloney, however, was not checking out a new acquisition, but drove a Volkswagen Polo GTI R5 run by Melvyn Evans Motorsport with co-driver Steve McNulty, another Barbados regular. It wasn’t his first competition at Brands Hatch, either, having raced a Radical SR3 there in 2016, qualifying ninth, with sixth his best result in the three races.
  As Maloney explains, he hadn’t driven the Polo before heading out of the Service Park to the start: “The Polo was good, but it is a pity I didn’t get to drive it before the first stage. Messed up a chicane on SS1 and lost loads of time, then found some barriers knocked into the road by another competitor and lost more time.”
  Placed 12th after the first of eight roughly four-mile stages, 24secs behind the leader, Maloney was fifth, third and second fastest on the next three stages to lie seventh at lunch. While eventual winner Igoe (Citroen C3 Rally2) was only beaten once all day, 19secs his margin of victory, there was still chance for Maloney to move up the order.
  Fourth, then third-fastest on the afternoon’s first two stages, Maloney drew level with Griffiths (Skoda Fabia Rally2) and Emma Morrison, another former Rally Barbados co-driver, in fifth place and just 1sec behind West (Peugeot 306 Maxi Kit Car), setting up a possible top four finish. It was not to be: “On SS7, we were baulked badly by another competitor who stalled in a hairpin, so we lost six or so seconds there. Then in the last stage in the dark, we were impeded on two laps by another Polo.”
  With British co-driver Neil Colman, Sherman was driving the Fiesta he has campaigned for the last year, which was in the UK for a rebuild after an accident in the BRC Winter Rally in November. Last year, the bonnet flying up on SS1 hampered his progress in the snow and ice, but he was delighted with his day this year: “Last year was a bucket list item for me to race on the iconic Brands Hatch raceway. My car was here getting repaired and I couldn’t resist coming back out to test it.”
  With experience of the previous event, Sherman was 20th on SS1, then setting the eighth fastest time on the final stage before lunch promoted him to 13th overall, challenging for a top 10 finish. The final stage after sundown would be crucial, Sherman pulling out all the stops, winning a tie-break for the final top 10 place with Robert Morris (Fiesta R5), whom he had beaten in five of the day’s eight stages: “I will admit I pushed a bit harder on the last stage to make sure we could get that 10th position.”
  Both Maloney and Sherman will contest the next round of the CRC, the Snetterton Stages in Norfolk (February 8) – another venue where Maloney has raced in a Radical – along with Minott (Fiesta Rally2), who will hoping to improve on his luck after retiring from the Brands Hatch event last Saturday with gearbox problems.
  BCIC RB25, the Caribbean’s biggest motor sport international, will run from Friday, May 30 to Sunday, June 1. The Auto & Rally Show (May 24), where a display of every car entered is the focal point of a huge celebration of island rallying, and the final shakedown and seeding event, King of the Hill (May 25), fill the previous weekend.

Rally Barbados is a tarmac rally, with around 20 special stages run on the island’s intricate network of public roads, under road closure orders granted by the Ministry of Transport & Works; the previous Sunday’s King of the Hill ‘shakedown’, run under a similar arrangement, features four timed runs on a roughly four-kilometre stage, the results of which are used to seed the running order for the main event.

For media information only. No regulatory value.

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