Gore’s Craig Cormack wears many hats when it comes to the Eastern Southland Car Club and the MLT Barry Robinson Memorial Wyndham Rally.
Cormack is part of the organising committee for the event, he is a sponsor and he also competes.
Cormack and his wife Alison’s business, Custom Build Engineering, sponsored a special stage at the event last year and this year will support Class F for up to 1700cc 2wd Classics, in which he will compete. “It would be quite nice to win my own class,” he laughs. Sporting success runs in the family, too, as Alison is a former international netball umpire.
Cormack also does a fine job of competing, and it was a Wyndham Rally in a Mazda RX2 that set him off on his rallying career many years ago when he was 18 or 19 years old.
For many years now, he has rallied a Toyota Levin AE86 with plenty of success, finishing second in his class in last year’s Wyndham Rally.
“We had a good run, and it was an enjoyable event last year,” he recalls. “It was good to see the way it was run and the local support for it. There was a massive number of spectators out there as the day went on.”
This year, Cormack changed the engine in the Toyota to enable him to run in the Classic section of Rally Otago. Unfortunately, the engine had oil surge problems during the event, and he had to withdraw. However, Cormack said his engine builder worked to get things right and made some changes, so he decided to enter the Canterbury Rally to test the engine.
“At the Canterbury Rally, everything was going okay, and then we got to Special Stage 7, and I had the first really big off of my career. I’ve been doing it a long time and that was the first time anything that big had happened to me. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was actually leading the class when it happened.
“We are lucky we have better safety gear these days – better belts, seats and head restraints. Myself & co-driver Mike Wilson were both okay, just a bit sore. My confidence took a knock, but a run at the recent Mt Misery Hillclimb was about restoring that confidence, and everything went pretty well.
“The Levin is an older car so the rebuild took time. We had to be careful around the suspension points. I was able to do a bit myself. We need to thank Simon and the team at Beatties Collison Repair Centre for their help.”
Looking ahead, Cormack says the class features a “tough field” this year. “Richie Chadwick is very talented and probably half my age,” he jokes. “He is a good, young guy. We all have to get to the finish, though.
“We are looking for a good result for the people who helped us rebuild the car. A friend of mine, David Kirk, who is a panel beater by trade, turned up with some new tools he had brought and said he was here to help. That was very much appreciated, along with many others in the rally community who offered to help repair the car.”
This year’s rally will again be centred on the township of Wyndham, 45 kilometres east of Invercargill and 25km south of Gore.
It will start at the MLT Three Rivers Hotel in Redan Street, Wyndham, at 9.15am on Saturday, August 10, from where competitors will tackle five Special Stages, with only minimal changes to a couple of last year’s routes.
The rally then ends back at the MLT Three Rivers Hotel in Wyndham, with the first car due at 3:47 p.m. after 128km of Special Stage competition linked by 126km of touring stage mileage.
