 |
 |
The third round of 2007 China Rally Championship was held on July 14th in Liupanshui city of Guizhou province. Subaru Rally Team China prepared one 07MY, one 06MY and one 05MY WRX STI SPEC C cars, while drivers are Dean Herridge, Michael Lieu and Li Wei.
There are totally 10 gravel special stages with a total length of 190.23km.
Leg 1
As no systematic test was done before rally, Dean and his car were hard to perform the best at the start of race. However, Dean secured the third outright from the very beginning, only 20 seconds behind the previous car and dropped the next to nearly 3 minutes. Unfortunately, he got a flat tyre at the final stage, lost nearly 2 minutes. But he safely gained the third place and one point for team. Michael showed his full experience from the start, but he didn’t seem to have luck and got 2 flat tyres in SS 1 and 2, lost nearly 3 minutes. After adjustment, he smoothly finished SS 3 and 4, and moved up to 6th outright. However, his car slipped off road due to wet surface in SS5, and withdrew from rally. Li Wei also endured continuous punctures and gave away more than 3 minutes to his rivals. But the experience of last year and stable performance made him move up to 7th outright and 4th nationally end of leg one.
Leg 2
Since there was a big time gap from previous car, team changed strategy for Dean to keep the stable pace till the end. Dean well did it and obtained third overall to make SRTC stand on the podium again, which also made SRTC stand into the yearly top three. Li Wei had two more punctures in SS 7 and 8. However, he finished the rally 11th overall Gr.N.
At the end of 3rd Rd of 2007 CRC, SRTC was obtained 7 points, and at the 3rd position with 16 points overall.