Brian O'Mahony and John Higgins suffered more bad luck in the Tesco 99 Octane MSA British Rally Championship as they failed to finish last weekend's
Jim Clark International Rally due to a mechanical problem.
County Cork driver O'Mahony and County Mayo co-driver Higgins were back in action in round two of the BRC in their OM Concrete Products and Tom Hogan Motors-backed Super 1600 Renault Clio, run by O'Leary Motorsport, for the 160-mile Scottish Borders-based tarmac event but were forced out after stage seven on Saturday.
The rally did not get off to the best of starts for the pair as an engine mount broke on the start line of stage one before they avoided going off further into the opening test. On the first loop of stages their intercom also broke and they caught a car on one stage, causing them to lose a significant amount of time.
The mechanics were unable to fix the mounting at the first service meaning the crew had to crawl through the next loop of stages losing further time. The team managed to repair the broken mounting in the next service before disaster struck when the other engine mount broke seven miles from the end of stage seven. They crawled through the remainder of the test but it was too risky to continue as the cam pulley was rubbing on the chassis and they did not want to cause any further damage.
The disappointment comes for O'Mahony and Higgins after they had to finish under SupeRally rules and not competitively in the first round of the BRC last month, they have also yet to complete a Jim Clark Rally as it was the fourth time they have started it and the fourth time they have retired.
"I'm really disappointed with the weekend, we didn't manage to get one clean stage and if we didn't lose all the time and had not had the problem we would have been up inside the top eight or so which would have been a good result," 23-year-old O'Mahony said.
