1,2,3 October 2021 Weekend Report

Donegal Harvest Rally, Racing at Monza and Mondello

🏁🏁🏁 Donegal Harvest Rally 🏁🏁🏁
Limerick MC members had mixed results at yesterday’s Donegal Harvest rally. The event been renowned as being a wet slippery tarmac event lived up to its reputation as crews struggled with tyres & rustiness because of the 17 months of cars parked in sheds on a damp roads caused by intermittent rain throughout the day!
Highest on the time sheets was Keith Moriarty (pictured below) who was on the notes for Sam Moffett where the pair slotted into a podium placing at 3rd.
Club member; Niall Maguire placed next in his trusty Subaru Impreza WRC at 9th overall...
Next to feature & a fine drive to 24th overall was Chris O Callaghan. Winning Class 13 by sizeable margin!
Limerick Forest COC & experienced nav: Anthony Nestor kept Stuart Biggerstaff honest to a fine finish at 26th.
Junior category:
John Keneally & Eugene Cronin had a commendable finish in tricky conditions in a very competitive junior section.
Unfortunately, other members:
- Keith Lyons & Tom Murphy registered a DNF.

Monza and Mondello racing

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The club's two regular racers were in action this weekend but not at the same venue! Paul O'Connell got another chance to race in Italy and Roland Doherty was on home ground at Mondello Park.
The HS Engineering team brought Paul to the Monza Circuit for a Boss GP race in their World Series car. After qualifying p10 on Saturday morning, Paul took 6th place in the race that afternoon. For the feature race on Sunday Paul started from 9th on the grid, Conditions were wet but Paul opted to start on slick tyres with the rest of the field on wets. By lap 2 Paul was up to 5th place, but he was a little greedy with the power and spun, dropping him to tenth and last . Paul worked his way back to 4th, an incident on lap 6 briefly neutralised proceedings, during which the other drivers switched to slicks, did not diminish Paul's charge through the field and held the lead on lap 9. Paul tried to defend his lead from Marco Ghiotto in a GP2 car, Ghiotto got through after a few attempts for Paul to finish second. Paul said after the event "MONZA!! Absolute dream result".
Back at home Roland was showing people how to drive in the wet. Race 1 was on a nearly dry track. Roland started 8th and got two places at the start by lap 6 he had 5th and 4rh lap 8. He was now 2.695 seconds behind Michael Connelly in a Radical, by lap 12 Roland had this down to 0.243s but yellow flags and a safety car ended Roland's charge at third place. The second race was in wet conditions and Roland brought his wet driving skills to the fore. This time he got his podium position with third, finishing 14.486s behind Sylvie Mullins Gould Judd V8 (in the wetter conditions earlier in the race Roland had this gap down to 1.473s) and 30.399s clear of Michael Roche in 4th place.
Willie Barrett who is heading to the Hill Climb Masters at Braga, Portugal next weekend had to use the ITCC race as a test of his Honda Civic after gearbox issues on Friday. Willie had a successful race giving him the opportunity to familiarize himself with the sequential gearbox.
And now for something different between helping Roland and Willie at Mondello Friday and Sunday, Gerard O'Connor spent Saturday working as Section Observer at Sporting Trail aka a mud plug near Greystones.