The rally is back on. At last!

Oberon will host a round of the NSW Rally Championship for the third successive year. Based again at the Oberon Leagues Club, The Midstate Freight Caves Classic Rally will be run on Saturday, October 10. The event will be Round 2 of the MTA NSW Rally Championship, the East Coast Classic Rally Series and the NSW Clubman and Hyundai Series.

North Shore Sporting Car Club are again promising a challenging time for competitors, but in a break from tradition this year all stages will be run in the forests around Oberon without going east to Hampton or Jenolan State Forests. There will be nine competitive stages (one run once, four run twice, with the last two stages happening as Daylight Saving brings on dusk) in Lowes Mount, Essington and Vulcan State Forests. As in the past, the service park and rally headquarters will be at the Leagues Club. Unfortunately, the nature of rallying makes it difficult to control spectator numbers and satisfy the regulations about the sizes of groups, so there will be no official spectator points.

The rallies which have been run since the COVID19 restrictions on sporting events were lifted have attracted full fields of competitors eager to get back on the dirt roads, so a full field of 70 cars is expected. With a minimum of four people per car (two in the car, two service crew) plus the many officials the event will bring in well over 300 visitors to the town to spend money on fuel, food and accommodation.

All the roads are in excellent condition and competitors can look forward to an enjoyable time driving on some of the best rallying roads in the country.

What some of the roads will look like

You can read a full report of the event plus see a lot of pictures at ausrally.com.

A version of this story appeared in the Oberon Review on October 8, 2020


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