The Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy crew of Jon Armstrong and Eoin Treacy have recorded their best result of the FIA European Rally Championship so far by taking a deserved seventh place in Rally Islas Canarias.
The all-tarmac rally was the second round of the 2024 campaign and the M-Sport Ford Fiesta Rally2 crew improved on their eighth place on Rally Hungary in April.
They were sixth overall after Friday's opening day but an intercom issue on Saturday cost them valuable time, despite also allowing them to show their ingenuity.
"We started well on Saturday and we were setting top five-times from the get-go. That was really good as we were trading times with all the frontrunners," explained Treacy.
"The margins were still tight on Sunday morning, then we had an intercom issue so we had to resort to shouting and hand signals. We had a strong finish in the PowerStage and finished sixth on that. It was a very strong weekend and we are very happy."
Such was their pace over the weekend the Irish team finished just behind reigning ERC champion Hayden Paddon and held off a late event charge by Mads Ostberg, a multiple-event winner at this level, by two seconds.
Just 2.8 seconds was the margin between winner Yoann Bonato and his French compatriot Mathieu Franceschi after nearly 200 km of competition in which France's.
Meanwhile, Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy driver Aoife Raftery has moved into third place in the FIA Junior Rally Championship after another strong performance on Rally Islas Canarias.
The Craughwell-based driver, the only female in the Irish Rally Academy, is in her second year of ERC competition and built on her career-best fourth-place finish in Hungary with another point-scoring performance, finishing ninth of 14 starters overall and moving up to third.
"We always knew coming to the Canaries that we would not have the same speed on this specialised tarmac as we had on the gravel roads in Hungary," she said.
"The target was to finish the rally. The top-ten finish was great and it is even better that we are now third in the championship as it returns to my preferred gravel in Sweden in June."
Raftery, who was co-driven by Antrim’s Hannah McKillop, was the leading female driver in the event.
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