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The second round of 2007 China Rally Championship was held on June 15th in Huairou Dist. of Beijing. Subaru Rally Team China prepared two 06 MY and one 07 MY WRX STI SPEC C cars, while drivers are Dean Herridge, Michael Lieu and Li Wei.
The rally contested 10 tarmac special stages which made two loop with 5 staged each with a total length of 180km around Huairou, outskirt of historical the Great Wall. The road is wide and very typical mountain road with a lot of up and down. There is also high speed section which average speed would be over 130km/h in some place. The surface is smooth asphalt as it has been just sealed, so the grip level is pretty high although those grip would be disappear suddenly if the machine made cutting inside corner and the sand from inside of corner would be strewn. The weather was sunny during two days competition and air temperature ranged from 25 to 30 degree in mid of the day. This Chinese Rally Championship is known as having competitor from Taiwanese TV star or popular novelist in Shanghai. With taking place the event around Chinese capital, huge number of spectators visited Service Park or ceremonial finish.
Leg 1
Team Ace Dean Herridge made a smooth starting and kept on moving up stage by stage. At the end of leg one, he was fourth outright with only 11.2 second behind the previous car. Michael showed to us his experience and skills. His stable driving secured the 8th outright and 3rd nationally. Li Wei started to use Australian co-driver Glen Weston this time, which greatly helped his result. He didn’t use AP brake system, but still got the 9th outright and 4th nationally.
Leg 2
In order to get into podium position, Dean chose softer tyre at the beginning of Leg 2, but a puncture happened in SS8 which made him lost nearly 1 minute, and fell to 6th overall. But Dean kept on pursuing, while Honghe team driver retired, so finally, he finished rally 5th overall. Michael kept a stable pace, and finished 7th overall and third nationally. Li Wei’ s car slid off road in SS7 and retired, lost the position of 8th outright and 4th nationally.
At the end of 2nd Rd of 2007 CRC, SRTC was obtained 6 points, and at the 4th position with 10 points overall.
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Comment from Dean Herridge
“I’m very grad to get this chance to compete Chinese Rally Championship. This time every circumstance were new for me as our machine was very new as just being developed, wearing Yokohama tyre was new experience, also it was first to drive tarmac road in China. Even though I was very enjoyed this event. We still need some time to be used so the result of this event was not perfect, but I’m pretty sure that we could see good performance at rest of rally this year. So let see how is going.”