Evans bags vital points in BRC return
After a disastrous 2016, Meirion Evans made his return to the British Rally Championship at the recent Border Counties Rally bagging some vital points in his quest for title glory in 2017.
Making the switch over the winter break to the Peugeot 208 R2, Evans and long-time co-driver Jonathan Jackson entered the Jedburgh based event determined to put their recent run of bad luck behind them. Despite a troubled run up to the event, which meant sending the car’s ECU back to Peugeot Sport in France less than 10 days before the event-limiting test mileage, the pair achieved their goal, taking fourth place overall in the hotly contested Junior British Rally Championship category – equaling their best result in the process.
The event would see 21-year-old Evans and 27-year-old Jackson head to the forest stages in the Scottish Borders for the first time, with the extremely slippy stages in Elibank, Cardrona and North Kielder – stages synonymous with the Scottish Rallies of old – waiting to catch out the unwary. A steady approach was the order of the weekend, a lack of mileage in the car in the run up to the event resulting in the pair learning the Melvyn Evans Motorsport prepared 208 with every mile.
After two dark stages in Craik Forest, Evans lay inside the top five overnight, despite not feeling totally comfortable aboard his new machine. An overcast morning greeted the crews as they headed into the Northern tip of the grueling Kielder complex, the Lampeter driver now beginning to settle into the 208 R2 and setting times that would see him mix it with those at the head of the class, despite playing it safe and not pushing to catch the crews in front.
“It’s nice to finally get to the end of a rally without any major problems after all the issues over the past 12-13 months. I’ve been driving turbo cars for the last 3 years and along with not being able to carry out the mileage we’d hoped to get in before the first round it was always going to be difficult to be right on the pace. That showed on the first night, I just wasn’t comfortable with the car and threw too much time away. For day 2, we made the decision to focus on building our confidence with the car and getting into how the car worked so to be close to the pace is very promising considering we drove very safely and were well within ourselves for the entire day. I had underestimated how much confidence I had lost in my driving over the past year so it’s good to be making steps in the right direction again and hopefully we can start to build some momentum going forward. Thankfully there’s a bit of a gap to the Pirelli so we can focus on getting some more mileage in before then.”
Next up for the Junior British Rally Championship crews is the Pirelli International Rally at the end of April, the Carlisle based event marking the first event of the season where the Welsh pair can call upon their previous experience.
Meirion and Jonathan are delighted to welcome a new sponsor in Samco Sport for the remainder of 2017 and would also like to extend their thanks to their long term supporters: Melvyn Evans Motorsport, Race and Rally NI, Tim Hoare of Michelin Motorsport, West Wales Rally Spares, JD Tyres, GMF Motor Factors and Speedline Corse.
Many thanks to Jakob Ebrey Photography
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