Craig Rando and Scott Beckwith have enjoyed a solid victory of 14 seconds in the Experts Cup over the weekend, the sixth round Dunlop Tyres Motorsport Australia WA Rally Championship (WARC).
Collie and the surrounding areas played host to the six-stage rally, which saw 38 crews tackle 59 competitive kilometres.
Despite the highly competitive field, it was Rando and Beckwith who proved too good for the field thanks to an impressive run of four stage wins.
Taking out second place were Gary Whittle and Ryan Doe, who comfortably finished two-minutes in front of of Ben Searcy and Daymon Nicoli.
Rando and Beckwith’s victory came off the back of their solid start to the rally where they won the first four stages – their stage two victory of 16 seconds over Whittle and Doe the largest of the day.
Stage five turned out to be quite competitive amongst the top three as Searcy and Whittle shared the honours courtesy of posting the same time.
This allowed both drivers to claw back the margin to Rando ever so slightly after the leader finished the stage three seconds slower.
Whittle ended the day with a sole win on the final stage as he edged out Rando by two tenths of a second, however it was too little as the latter had done enough to win the event.
With Searcy falling short of the third placed Doug Tostevin and Daniel Adams for the stage by two and half seconds, it gave Whittle outright second place – Tostevin and Adams finishing sixth for the day.
A fourth on the final stage secured a fourth place overall finish for Dave Thomas and Mandy Lister, while Abe Tuckett and Murish O’Connell rounded out the top five ahead of Tostevin and Adams.
The rally proved challenging for many drivers with 17 cars retiring throughout the event.
One of the more high-profile DNFs were Alex Rullo and Steve Glenney when the pair was forced to retire during stage four after a mechanical issue, having run third overall up to that points.