Barely mid-way through only their 2nd season in rallying, Steve Long and Wendy Gibson are now joint leaders in the BMW Beginners' Championship after achieving 2nd overall in the Rally Marketing Mid Wales Stages on 25 June, run over 6 stages and 45 miles of gravelled forest roads.

The rally began awkwardly when barely a third of the way into Stage 1, they caught up with the car in front of them and, with so much dust flying around, had great difficulty in seeing to get past, in the process losing 15 seconds to the leading car of Jim Dowle. Stage 2 went well for them but their nearest rival in the champioship went out with a huge accident that wrote off the car and left the co-driver with a fractured vertebra. It is the sort of news that can have a dampening effect on even the moct competitive of rallyists and may explain why, although Stage 3 also seemed to go well, the pair were disappointed to find that at the end of it, they were now 28 seconds behind Dowle.

At a little over 12 miles, Stage 4 was going to be long enough to give them a chance to claw back some of that lost time, but unluckily it was cancelled after another big crash. And in his determination, Steve nearly lost it himself on Stage 5 when too much air over a jump left the car badly set up for the following water splash. He managed to hold it all together but a posse of photographers standing by the splash had the scare of their lives!

They were now only 13 seconds adrift of Dowle, but the final stage was too short (5.1 miles) for them to stand a chance of taking the lead, so Steve was happy to settle for 2nd place overall and joint leadership in the Beginners' Championship.

Their next rally is at Swansea Bay on 23 JUly.