The Exhilaration of Rallying
At just 24 Sam Gray is making her mark on the rallying world. This petite blonde can hold her nerve at 190km per hour and has even been a co-driver for Hayden Paddon. We caught up with her to find out more.
Words: Gilly Oppenheim. Photography: Supplied
Holding her nerve barrelling along at 190 km per hour, excellent concentration, accurate time management and organisational skills, as well as having good neck strength (as the rallies are spent looking down at pace notes in her lap) are all attributes Sam Gray has in spades. Not to mention sheer guts as the car skids on shingle, slides off the road on black ice, rolls down a bank or spins into a tree stump – all in a day’s rallying for this petite blonde 24 year old co-driver.
Rallying is in Sam’s blood. Her grandfather competed, and her parents, Sonya and Steve Gray met through rallying and competed together. Sam remembers watching them rallying when she was a pre-schooler, but it wasn’t until she was twenty and in her second year of her B.Ag Sci at Lincoln University, after standing on the side-line at Otago Rally in 2015, that she decided she wanted to give rallying a go.
And what remarkable strides she has made in the sport. A couple of months after watching the Otago Rally, Sam got her motorsport licence and started competing, never dreaming that one day she would be sitting in a rally car alongside Hayden Paddon. A friend of her parents, Barry Varcoe, needed a co-driver and so her rallying path was set. Her first start was in 2015 at the Catlins Coast Rally where they had not one but two crashes and unfortunately did not finish, but in the 2015 Spring Rally held in the Kakahu Forest near Geraldine, Sam and David Quantock had finished third in their class and sixth overall. She then teamed up with Keith Anderson and their first rallies were a chapter of mechanical gremlins – in the 2016 Mainland Rally Series they had an engine blow up, then a tyre rod arm bent, and the radiator hose broke, all within the first three rallies together. But none of these incidents deterred Sam from continuing to compete and Keith and Sam had a brilliant finish to the season with two first in class finishes and finished 3rd overall for the series.
In the past three years, Sam has certainly made an impression on the sport. She was selected for two national academies in 2017. The first, the Motorsport New Zealand Elite Motorsport Academy takes eight drivers or co-drivers from all four-wheeled motorsport events in New Zealand and teaches them “everything outside the car”. She was then chosen for the first Rally NZ Elite Co-drivers Academy, to develop top level navigators. Since then Sam has paired up with Regan Ross to drive in the New Zealand rally championship in a classic Ford Escort RS1800. Last year they won the International Otago Classic Rally and Sam took out the historic co-driver’s championship for the New Zealand Rally Championship.
So how did the opportunity to co-drive for Hayden Paddon come about? Last year she helped sell his merchandise at rally events, and she also prepared guests to take rides with him, by belting them in and giving them a few pointers on how to be a co-driver. At one test event she had the opportunity to take a test ride alongside Hayden, to see if she was on the right track by calling the pace notes at his rally pace. Hyundai New Zealand along with Pinnacle Program presented Sam with the chance to co-drive with Hayden in the Rally of Whangarei in May this year, which they won by over 4 minutes to their closest competitor. She had to be super-prepared, getting every single intricate detail of the course written down. This involves drivers and co-drivers going out onto the course for a reconnaissance or ‘recce’ the day before the event and writing down all the course details. These are refined at night and translated into her own language. There is no room for error! Sam relished this opportunity to compete at this level and was lucky enough to be offered another rally sitting with Hayden, at her local national rally, Rally of South Canterbury, which the pair won by 6 minutes and 54.4 seconds.
Sam told me that "You rely on man and machine, so you have to have talent, a good car and a good team". It is an expensive sport and Sam hasn’t had a real holiday for years. Her real job is as an onion agronomist for Southern Packers. The ultimate goal would be to go professional and Sam would love the opportunity to compete on the international stage.