Former Ulster Rally winner Keith Cronin says he cannot afford to put a wheel wrong on next week’s event if he is to continue his push towards a second Irish Tarmac Championship crown.
Based in Newry, the one-day closed-road event is the penultimate round of the cross-border competition, which Cronin provisionally leads by one-and-a-half points from Matt Edwards. Defending champion Callum Devine is third after five rounds on sixty-three points, with back-to-back victories in Killarney and Donegal helping to reignite his hopes of retaining the trophy.
After a dream start to the season which netted Cronin perfect scores in Galway and Clonakilty, and a runner-up finish at the Circuit of Ireland, the Ford Fiesta Rally2 driver lost momentum to a puncture while leading on the first day of the Killarney International and an opening day retirement in Donegal after the Cork man misjudged his braking point and kissed a stone wall.
“I’ve been saying all year that we don’t need to win all the rallies to win the Championship and as it turned out we haven’t won them all,” is Cronin’s assessment of the title fight so far. “We’ve taken two out of five, so yes, to be in with a realistic shot at the title, we do want to be winning from now on because if we don’t win, then it’s very likely that Matt or Callum will.
“It will boil down to maximum scores and dropped scores at the end of the season, and the points are very close between the three of us as things stand. We do need to aim for victory at the Ulster Rally. Anything else makes the task at the final round in Cork all the more difficult.”
Cronin, the 2016 Irish Tarmac Champion and a quadruple British Rally Championship winner, has experience of the stages around Newry, although that was in 2021 when he finished fifth. Organisers have announced plenty of changes for the 47th instalment of the Northern Ireland Motor Club Ltd competition, which is a single day affair – something Cronin is cognisant of.
“You certainly need to be focused from the off on the one-day rallies – there is no chance to build up the pace. It really needs to be 100% from the start,” says Cronin, who is navigated by Mikie Galvin – the same person who sat alongside him when they conquered the Ulster back in 2017. “If you let any of the others get the jump on you in the morning – or if you have any slip up – there is less mileage to make up the time loss, so a different approach is required.
“You need a bit of luck too when it is only one day, because any time loss is likely to be more costly than on the longer rallies. The other side of the coin is that there are less miles and therefore less opportunity for something to go wrong. At the end of the day, it is the same for everyone – we are all in the same rally. We have had the puncture in Killarney and the non-finish in Donegal, so hopefully the pendulum will swing back the other way again for us.”
