Cox breaks 17 year old record

FASTEST EVER: Rotorua rally driver Sloan Cox has broken the 17 year old course record at the Ashley Forest Rallysprint.

Even seemingly unbreakable records are eventually broken.

Last weekend, Rotorua rally driver Sloan Cox broke the 17-year-old record for the Ashley Forest Rallysprint, which was previously held by Kim Austin. Cox lowered the record by more than a second, to set a new time of 55.32 seconds over the 1.7km course.

Matt Summerfield won the event after Cox's car suffered a drive train breakage on the start line of the top two shoot out.

"It was a bit of a disappointing end, but as a team we felt breaking the record was more important than winning," said Cox. "No one else went close to [the record]."

After a shakedown at Motorsport Bay of Plenty's gravel hillclimb event two weeks earlier, Cox said the car was fast right from the start on Saturday.

"That (shakedown) didn't go the best. We had car problems and we struggled, but that was why we did it, to eliminate problems and give us a chance to fix the car and make the car easier to drive."

The first of Saturday's four qualifying runs had the top three seeds, Matt Summerfield driving Brian Green's Mitsubishi Mirage, Cox in the Hillclimb Beast and Mike Tall, also in a Mirage covered by .24 of a second, but the record still stood. On the fourth run of the day Cox had set the fastest time so far.

"That was one of our aims for the weekend - to finish the first day in the lead. But also during the first day everyone was talking about the record being broken.

"No one had been able to beat it, and they had started calling it the unbeatable record."

Cox said he was praying for good weather on the Sunday to give him a shot.

"We woke on Sunday and it was cloudy, but there was no rain. The cloud made it cooler and that made the car run better so that was awesome."

The first run of the day was the fifth and final qualifying run. Cox lowered the record, then took more time off it in his next run - the first of the top 16 shoot-out.

"Then we started to drop the pace back a little bit, just to make it to the top two shoot-out. We were still just about a second off the record, but we wanted to save our best tyres for the shoot out.''

At the top four stage, Cox lowered the record for the final time.

"At this point everyone was pretty impressed with how fast the car was going. We made it to the top two shoot-out, but the car broke on the start line, so we ended up being second for the weekend."

Cox had also finished second in this year's New Zealand Rally Championship, driving a Mitsubishi Evo X.

"Jumping from the Evo X rally car into this car, which are two very different cars, and to have speed like that was pretty cool. I thought it might take some time to adapt to it, but it didn't and from the start of day two we were just on it."

"We were setting the pace for others to beat, and no one was able to catch up with us."