Imbil Rally 2026: 7th Outright in Front-Wheel Drive, Then a Sunday to Forget
This is our first year of gravel rallying. The whole point is seat time and experience, and honestly, we're a group of friends having fun. The Imbil Rallysprint Doubleheader tested the fun part. It's two separate one-day rallysprints on the Queensland October long weekend, based at the Imbil Showgrounds in the Mary Valley, and they were the final two rounds of the 2026 Queensland Rally Championship.
Getting there was a project of its own. Ethan flew in from Adelaide the day before. Nigel Waters and Jemma met us the next morning, and we did the whole 13-hour road trip from Sydney to Queensland in a single day. Nigel was a last-minute call-up to the left seat. This weekend was his first time calling for us.
Ethan's verdict on arrival: the car was pretty much ready. It needed a quick brake bleed and one more check-over before Saturday. We ran as car 22 in the wagon, class P5.
Blind again
Imbil is run off a road book: tulip diagrams, no reconnaissance, no pace notes. We've done enough of these now to have an opinion, and the opinion is that road books are much harder than pace notes. When we get a recce and write our own notes, we can trust them, and we're a lot faster. Some road books this year have had distances so far out that it was impossible to tell where we were on the stage. (If you're new to the format, here's what a blind rally actually is.)
SS1, Borumba, went fine. The car felt balanced and we ran a consistent pace, finishing 13th fastest from a start position of 22nd. That was the calm before the storm.
SS2: the jumps, the lights and the diff
Breakneck, the second stage, changed the day. It has jumps you can't see until you're already in the air. Partway through, the dash started flashing high coolant temperature warnings, and the car went into limp mode. At the end of the stage the temperature dropped back to normal instantly, which pointed to an electrical fault rather than a cooling one. We were still 10th on the stage and up to 11th overall. The new goal was a top-ten finish by the end of the day.
Here's the moment the warnings came on, from the car.
Service was hectic. The car felt disconnected at the rear, and Ethan found out why: the rear diff had broken on one of the jumps. From that point the wagon was effectively front-wheel drive. We phoned Scotty, our mechanic back in Sydney, to help disable the safety feature that kept throwing the car into limp mode whenever it thought the coolant was too hot.
Front-wheel drive, climbing anyway
Seconds before the start of SS3, the coolant reading shot off the scale again. There was no time to deal with it, so we drove and hoped. Driving a rally car built for all-wheel drive through gravel hairpins on its front wheels alone is genuinely frightening. The car wants to run wide everywhere, and every corner becomes a negotiation. We weren't pushing hard. The aim was the middle ground: enough pace to stay in it, and enough restraint to keep the car alive and on the road.
It worked better than it had any right to:
- SS3, Borumba II: 10th on the stage, up two places to 9th overall.
- SS4, Breakneck II: 5th fastest, our best stage of the weekend, without a working rear diff. That surprised us too. Up to 8th.
- SS5 and SS6, the reverse runs: 8th and 7th on the stages, holding 8th. Somewhere in those two stages we also put a decent dent in the rear passenger door. We still don't know how or where.
SS7 was cancelled, which left one night stage, Borumba Reverse II, to bring the car home. I usually go well in the dark (what you can't see can't hurt you), but this time the job was only to finish. We were 11th on the stage, and other people's nights went worse than ours.
Saturday's result
7th outright and 3rd in P5, 56:19.1 across seven stages, from 33 starters with 22 finishers. It's only the second time we've finished in the top ten outright, after Rally Barossa, and we did it with a broken diff and a car that fought us all day. Ian Menzies and Robert McGowan won in their Yaris AP4.
Looking back over the gravel season, our results have climbed steadily. For a first year on gravel, we're pretty happy with that.
Sunday
We went into Sunday wanting to push for a better result. It didn't happen. The numbers tell most of it: Pullen, the 5.94 km opening stage, took us 33 minutes 21 seconds. When we ran the same stage again later in the day, it took four and a half minutes. On top of that came a 2:30 penalty at the next control.
Once we were going again, we were 9th to 13th fastest on each of the remaining seven stages. That's about the pace we'd have had all day, but there's no recovering half an hour in a rallysprint. We were classified 24th of 24 finishers, out of 26 starters. Menzies and McGowan won again, by 6.2 seconds from Josh Weidman.
We'll save what happened on Pullen for episode two, where you can see it properly.
From the event
Photos shot by our team.