The Blog
Event recaps, results, build diaries and updates from our 2026 gravel rally season.
Ten stages through the Barossa Valley's hills, the last of them in the dark — with 2021 SARC champion co-driver Adam Branford calling the notes. How a 31-year-old wagon finished 6th outright, 5th in the SA Rally Championship round and 2nd in P6, holding off a brand-new GR Yaris.
This Saturday we're in the Latrobe State Forest for the Ada River Rally — 8 blind stages, 180 competitive kilometres, a 36-car seeded field, and us starting 21st at 10:10. Here's the shape of the day, one week after Queensland.
Nine blind stages at Manumbar — no recce, no pace notes, the last three run in reverse in the dark. How our first Queensland rally became 2nd in Classic 4WD, 14th outright, and a pair of horseshoe trophies.
Our 1995 GF8 Impreza wagon started its gravel career with no diffs, a clutch with 10 mm of bite, and no ABS. Here's exactly what broke, what we fixed and when, across a full season of Australian club and championship rallying — no invented spec sheet, just what actually happened.
No pace notes, nobody calling corners — just a roadbook and whatever you can see coming. Three of our 2026 rounds have been blind rallies. Here's what that actually means, what it feels like from the driver's seat, and why so much of Australian club rallying still runs this way.
On 15 August we point the wagon north for our first-ever Queensland rally: three forest stages run twice in daylight and once in reverse in the dark, with classic and modern cars interleaved 'Otago style'. Here's everything we know about the Classic Queensland Rally — and why it might be the best-suited event on our calendar.
In one season we've raced pacenoted rounds, roadbook-only blind rallies, and an ARC event with a proper recce. Here's how each format actually works from inside the car — what pace notes are, how they get written, and what happens when you have none at all.
Our clutch spent half the 2026 season dying — pedal to the floor, nothing, then 10 mm of bite right at the top — and finally gave up mid-event at our ARC debut. Here's what you can actually do without a clutch in a rally car, what you can't, and what it cost us.
Round three of the NSW Rally Championship took us to the Eurobodalla forests for the Lazer Rally of the Bay. We brought the classic Impreza home 14th outright — and 4th in class in the East Coast Classic — on a day that wrecked a third of the field.
Half a season into our first year on gravel, here's how Shakewell Racing's 2026 campaign has gone so far — the results, the DNFs, and what's still to come.
Our first crack at the AMSAG Southern Cross series took us to the far South Coast for the Bega Valley Rally — one of Australia's oldest events. Here's how the weekend unfolded.
The Narooma Forest Rally was our Australian Rally Championship debut — the top tier, against the fastest crews in the country. It was also where the clutch we'd been complaining about all season finally, properly gave up. We finished anyway: 18th outright.
Our biggest event of the year — a 16-hour drive to South Australia, a blind rally in the dark with no lights, a gearbox that gave up on day two, and somehow our best result of the season. This one was an adventure.
Snow on the recce, an engine that wouldn't start in the cold, finally some pace on dry tarmac — and then it all went quiet. Two rounds of ATR, two blown turbos, and about $30k for less than two days of racing. The honest one.
The plan after Bathurst was to fix the clutch. We didn't fix the clutch. So the very next weekend we rocked up to the Mitta Mountain Rally with the exact same one — and this time it was a blind rally, which I did not remotely understand until it was too late.
Michael had never driven gravel in his life. Rachael's a seasoned gravel navigator who'd been pushing for it since day one. Rally of Bathurst 2026 was the result — our first gravel rally together, and here's how the car fought us the whole way to 26th.
Betsy dropped an engine days before the event, so we almost didn't make the start at all. When we did, Valentine's Day at Mt Buller gave us tractor mode, a zip-tie fix, one genuinely quick run — and then, 13 km into a 15 km stage, it all went quiet. We thought we'd run out of fuel. It was the turbo.