Motorsport: Paddon wins rally

Geraldine's Hayden Paddon has extended his national motor rally championship points lead with his win in the Rally of Wairarapa today.

Paddon now has 274 points and heads into September's final round in Nelson needing just a minor placing to secure back-to-back national titles.

His closest challenger is today's big mover, Emma Gilmour, from Hamilton who finished third.

The result saw Gilmour replace Richard Mason in second overall on 216 points and she is the only driver who has a sniff of a chance to stop Paddon from retaining his title.

Mason's hopes of reclaiming the title he last won in 2006 disappeared today when he retired near the finish of the 15.33km Central Mangaone stage.

He was two seconds in front of Paddon after the first two stages today but rolled out of the rally near Eketahuna.

Neither Mason nor his co-driving wife, Sara, was injured in the incident. They managed to roll the car from its roof onto its side, but could not push it back onto its wheels and regain the road.

He is now trailing Paddon by 74 points and there are not enough points available from the final round to make up the deficit.

Paddon, clocked two hours, 27 minutes, 28.9 seconds to beat Palmerston North's Geoff Argyle by 3min 28.6sec.

" It's a good points buffer -- everything's gone to plan this weekend," said Paddon.

" We wanted to win this rally but we knew it'd be tough.

"We had a really good battle with Richard yesterday and this morning, unfortunately it didn't happen right to the end which would have been nice but we got the result we wanted."

Gilmour should have finished second but dropped to third after she was penalised for starting late this morning.

" The day didn't begin as we would have liked as the car wouldn't fire up," Gilmour said.

" Finally when we got it going, it died at the start control, so was heart-in-the-mouth for 13 minutes until it decided it would go again.

"So we were very very lucky to do today and to have such a good finish and be in the championship," she added.

- NZPA