OVER 90 crews have already entered this year’s Killarney Rally of the Lakes which will be based in the town on the May bank holiday weekend.
Sponsored by Cartell.ie in association with the Gleneagle Hotel Group, the stage is set for a great battle in all classes and categories for 35th staging of the action-packed rally.
Heading the international entry list is last year’s winner, Gary Jennings who is likely to start the event in the top slot. Behind him comes the current leader of both the Tarmac and the National Championships, Declan Boyle, with two-time Lakes winner Daragh O’Riordan and former winner Denis Cronin also in contention.
West Cork Rally winner Donagh Kelly will be seeking his first Killarney win, while the 2012 Billy Coleman award winner, Sam Moffett, in his Fiesta WRC, will be anxious to make his mark on the international rally scene.
Local
Local driver Alan Ring has reverted to his Group N Subaru for this season but he faces stiff opposition from drivers such as Josh Moffett (Evo) and former national Group N champion Colm Murphy.
Making a welcome return to the rally scene is Aaron McHale who will be seeking to continue in the winning ways which made his father, Austin, a multiple Tarmac Rally champion.
In the national rally all the big Escort brigade come out to play but perhaps the person who will cause opponents most bother is Donegal milkman Declan Gallagher who won the modified section of the 2013 Rentokill Killarney Historic Rally last December.
Gallagher went on to repeat the category win in the West Cork Rally and will be anxious to consolidate his claim to the top spot in the modified challenge of the Clonakilty Black Pudding Tarmac Championship.
Returned
Others well in contention in the national section include local driver Barry Meade who has returned to rallying after a year of competitive cycling, Fergus O’Meara who won the national section last and Billy Coleman award finalist Rob Duggan in his incredibly quick Honda Civic.
Last year’s FIA Historic Rally of the Lakes winner Wesley Patterson has abandoned his Appendix K Car to revert to his more familiar modified machine and will also be a strong contender, as will the legendary Phil Collins.
Killarney’s Ed Murphy comes to the event on the back of two great drives in the Dunlop national series, which have netted him a fifth overall in Birr and ninth overall in the recent Circuit of Kerry, while Roy White, who appears to have sorted the reliability problems in his Rover MG, has the speed to mix it with the best.
The battle for the John Mullane Cup for the highest placed driver from Kerry will be as closely contested.
Apart from the Kerry crews already mentioned, one can never rule out the father-and-son combination of Charlie and Johnny Hickey whose experience of these stages is vast, as indeed is that of John Hickey, Kevin O’Donoghue and Vincent O’Shea.
The FIA Historic Rally will run ahead of the international rally and will be headed by Millstreet’s Mark Falvey, the start-to-finish winner of the Rentokill Historic Rally last December and the historic section of the 2013 Cork 20 International
The event gets underway with a ceremony in Killarney town centre on Friday evening with competitive motoring getting underway on Saturday morning to tackle a loop of three stages at Moll’s Gap, Beallaghbeama and Caragh Lake before returning to service at the Liebherr factory in Fossa.
A second loop of these three classic stages follows before tackling the final stage at Kilcummin, which is a shortened version of the stage which featured as the finale of the Killarney Historic Rally for the past two years.
The first day’s stages will be familiar to most Rally of the Lakes regulars but there are some variations such as a hairpin right at the end of Moll’s Gap and Beallaghbeama reverting to the longer version which was a feature of the earlier years of the Rally of the Lakes.
Classics
Sunday sees the cars tackle Moll’s Gap for the third time and then it’s on to a loop of three stages which have not been used for 10 years in the Rally of the Lakes. The first of these, Borlin, is actually a combination of two old classics, Sheen River and Borlin, and takes the rally over the county bounds into Cork. The second is the fabulous lakeside stage at Lough Allua.
Fuhiry, which starts outside Ballingeary, brings the rally back over the county bounds, past Creedons at the Top of Coom, the highest pub in Ireland, and finishes on a fast downhill section towards Kilgarvan.
Service in Kenmare Mart is followed by a further trip over the same loop of three and the rally concludes a run over Moll’s Gap.
