Classic Queensland Rally 2026: 2nd in Classic 4WD, Blind and Into the Night

The Classic Queensland Rally was a first on several fronts: our first Queensland event, the first running of the rally itself, and our first time racing the same roads in daylight and then again in the dark. Round 4 of the Queensland Rally Championship and a round of the East Coast Classic Rally Series, run by the Brisbane Sporting Car Club out of the Manumbar Campdraft Grounds, about 90 km north of Kilcoy.

The format is properly old-school: completely blind. No reconnaissance — banned for 30 days before the event, enforced with spot checks — and no pace notes. Three stages (Pungun, Beauty and the 25 km Bushnell), each run twice during the day, then once more in reverse, at night. Nine stages, 132.5 km competitive, with classic and modern QRC machinery interleaved on the same roads. We ran as car 7 in the Classic field, one of 46 starters.

The day: learning roads at race pace

Heat 1 was everyone's first look at everything. We put in a tidy 6:25.0 on the Pungun opener, then found our rhythm where it counts — SS3, the long Bushnell stage, was our best of the whole rally: 13th outright, blind, at about 96 km/h average over 25 km.

Heat 2 proved what one sighting run is worth. Second time through Pungun we went 5.3 seconds faster and set our quickest average of the day, around 101 km/h; Beauty II came down by nearly twenty seconds. Then Bushnell II bit — almost a minute slower than our first run through, our only real dent of the day, while up front Josh Weidman was taking half a minute out of his own first pass.

The night: same roads, backwards, in the dark

Whatever you think you've learned in two daylight passes matters a lot less when the road runs the other way at night. This is what the light bar is for. The night heat also produced the drive of the rally from someone else: Andrew Carrigan's Mitsubishi Magna beat every 4WD in the field outright on Bushnell Reverse, five seconds up on Weidman's Evo 9 — in the dark, in a 2WD Magna. We took a second and a half's satisfaction of our own from that stage: after 17 minutes flat out, that was the whole gap to the car ahead of us.

The result

2nd in Classic 4WD (ECCRS), 14th outright — 1:26:45.5 across the nine stages, in a field where 37 of 46 starters made the finish. Weidman and Ryan Preston won the event comprehensively. The presentation ran late into the night at the campdraft grounds, and the trophies are horseshoe plaques — which, for a rally based at a campdraft ground, is exactly right.

The full provisional classification, every crew's stage times and the photo gallery are on the event page, and every stage of ours is on the @shakewellracingpov channel as a full onboard — including the night stages.

Next up: Ada River, this Saturday, blind again.