But the other big contest to be settled was in B2 and this was another battle resolved in a dramatic last stage. Clive King/Bob Ward and Terry Cree/Richard Shores set off at a stunning pace in their Mini Coopers and were just a second apart at the end of the opening Gale Rigg stage. But Cree/Shores than spent a minute and a half in a Cropton ditch, and the matter seem settled. Despite a failing head gasket and a broken front shock absorber, King pressed on and was within a mile of the finish of the final stage when a massive engine failure ended his rally. Despite another minute in a ditch, Cree/Shores duly took over the class win and the B2 championship title, as Graeme and Richard Godfrey took their Cooper S to second in class.
Category 2
A mighty battle for category two honours was also resolved on the final stage as three Porsche 911s emerged from the 14-mile Givendale stage covered by just two seconds.
With a couple of stages to run, Steven Smith/John Nichols seemed to have done enough to claim victory, but chasing hard were Sean Lockyear/Chris Wood and Andrew Haddon/Mark Crisp. Smith took only a five-second margin into that stage and admitted that he concentrated rather too much on the gap to Lockyear. "I backed off too much and nearly got caught," said Smith.
However, Lockyear had an overshoot in Givendale and it was Haddon who blitzed the stage to pull back a massive 18s on Smith and grab second, just 1.7s behind the XS Racing Porsche and four-tenths of a second ahead of Lockyear. "It's been a great battle all day," said Lockyear.
Chasing the Porsches was the Escort Mk1 of Stokes and Weaver, but their focus was on the title contest. "We've been trying to win this for five years," said Stokes. "We got pretty close in 2005 and lost it by one point. I'm very proud of what we've done."
