Team PURE Digital pairing of Paul Alexander and Mike Panes had a frustrating outing on Rallye Sunseeker, ultimately succumbing to mechanical failure with just two stages remaining.

Hopeful of forcing his Yokohama-shod machine into the top 12, an out-of-practice Paul almost blotted his copybook on the opening sea-front stage as he came to grips with his latest specification Mitsubishi in front of the huge crowds who braved the freezing conditions. Whilst losing a handful of seconds, the team's real dramas would begin on Saturday's gravel stages in the Hampshire forests.

A ten second time loss due to a stalled engine in stage three was followed by a distinct loss of power in stage four - signalling that all was not well under the bonnet of the striking blue PURE Digital Evo. Despite being able to affect a temporary repair at the roadside before the next stage, the problem would soon reappear and force the pairing to cruise through the following two loops of stages and hope that no permanent damage would be done.

PAUL ALEXANDER: "The recent snow meant that we couldn't carry out a proper pre-season test, so to say that we were feeling rusty at the start would be an understatement! On the seafront stages we were really ragged and had a couple of "moments" under braking, but I'm sure the fans enjoyed it! We made another couple of mistakes this morning while I adjusted to the winter revisions we've carried out, and was just getting back into "rally-mode" when this problem intervened. What's particularly galling though is that it seems to be down to a low-cost component that we replaced as a precaution over the winter - sods law says that we'd have probably had no problems if we'd left the old one in there!"

After the SRM-Racing mechanics were finally able to apply a permanent fix at the service halt after stage 10, Alexander wasted no time in demonstrating what might have been. Three consecutive top fifteen times followed, even though he claimed to be taking things easy now that success was out of reach.

Now happy that the car was performing properly, and with some baseline times of other competitors to compare against, the crew elected to experiment with diff settings for the remainder of the event, but were forced out when a more severe loss of power manifested itself in stage 14 - almost certainly a result of driving on with the failing component earlier in the day.

MIKE PANES: "We're really upset at being forced out, but looking on the positive side we've had 4 clean stages today and managed decent times on each of them. We also beat every other Mitsubishi on those stages and, with the lead Mitsubishi taking 11th overall, we know that we could have achieved our aim of a top 12 placing even against such strong competition"

Team PURE Digital's next outing will be the Border Counties Rally, based in Jedburgh on March 19th.

Team PURE Digital is supported by the following leading companies:
PURE Digital, Polypipe Civils Ltd., Yokohama HPT, Co-ordSport, SRM-Racing, Bill Gwynne Rallyschool International, Birch Print Productions, Midland Turbo, Aquamist, Compomotive, Doughty Precision Engineering, Mellors Elliot Motorsport (MEM), Plastics-4-Performance, Pagid Racing, CamSport, Majenta Solutions, Shell Racing Fuels and PIAA.