Mason rules in China!

Masterton rally ace Richard Mason labelled his spectacular China rally championship win at Zheoijang Longyou, a town 400kms from Shanghai, on Monday night as "pretty much drive to survive stuff".
Mason, the 2005 and 2006 New Zealand rally champion, and his co-driver Sara Randall, steered their GT Tires Rally team Subaru, through atrocious weather and road conditions which created so much havoc that two-thirds of the field failed to finish the 16-stage three day event.
The torrential rain which fell throughout the first two days of the rally seen the roads-some of which were scheduled to be used up to four times- turn into quagmires.
Indeed only one of the 16 stages was covered at an average speed of more than 70km/h with one piece of road that was used three times allowing for speeds of just over 50kph.
Mason said he and Randall had never seen so much mud with conditions often being "treacherous and slippery".
"That super-slow stage was so tight and twisty-let alone boggy and rough- you were constantly using the handbrake to get round the hairpin bends," he said, a problem compounded by the fact their car wasn't fitted with a hydraulic handbrake.
Highlighting the tightness of that particular 16km stage was the fact it had co-driver Randall working off no fewer than 19 pages of notes.
"It was unbelievable but proved to be good for us as we managed to take time out of our main rivals and put them under real pressure," said Mason.
Pressure which led to Kamada, the CRC leader going into the last stage, crashing 500 metres into it and losing a wheel of his Subaru.
The progress made by Mason and Randall though was more because of smart planning than any advantage they had in speed.
Randall said they had taken a conservative approach after being given strict instructions to keep their car on the road as they were the only GT Tires team members still going."We worked on the theory that if the others fell off the road or struck trouble we would move up the leaderboard," she said
And that proved to be exactly what happened with Mason and Randall improving from seventh overnight to claim the title. "It really was drive to survive stuff and extremely tough on the transmissions and drive train. We spent so much time in the low gears we virtually wore out second (gear)," Mason said.
The Rally of China also doubled as the final round of this year's FIA Asia-Pacific Rally Championship (APRC) and the only driver there to finish ahead of the Masterton partnership was Australian Cody Crocker.
Just 5min 48.5 separated them with the third place overall going to the Japanese Yanagisawa who was more than two-and-a-half minutes in arrears of Mason.