New Zealand’s rising star says injury won’t slow him long

In motorsport, no injury is glamorous, but Mark Tapper was particularly embarrassed by the way he fractured his wrist, reports Eric Thompson in Saurday's New Zealand Herald.

The inaugural Pirelli Star Driver competition winner for the Asia Pacific region is back in New Zealand nursing a few injuries after falling nearly 4m on to concrete after he slipped while cleaning his balcony.

Mark Tapper commented:

The arm is still a bit painful but it's healing well. I fractured a small bone in my wrist and also snapped the top of my humerus [upper arm bone] off that had to be pinned and plated with nine screws.

Tapper won the right to compete in six selected rounds of the World Rally Championship - Portugal, Sardinia, Greece, Finland, Spain and Britain - in a new Mitsubishi Evo X Group N car. His enforced layoff comes after three rounds of the series and Tapper is confident he'll be fit enough to head to Finland at the end of the month. His medical people have told him racing will be painful but further damage is unlikely.

In his first year in the main game, it's not only his body that's had a bit of bad luck, his new model rally car has been breaking a few things as well:

We have a brand new car no one has raced before and once before when Mitsubishi changed from the EVO six to the Evo seven they had a lot of problems. It takes a while to get them going, and bear in mind we were the first people in the world to start rallying in an Evo 10 at that level.

It seems all the bad luck has come my way before it went anyone else's way in the team. But saying that, at the last rally in Greece we got through the entire race with no component failure.
The other four cars, though, all had a major failure. I'm really confident about the car going to Finland.

To anyone who has competed at a high domestic level then raced internationally, the step up in skill, let alone machinery, is huge. Tapper though, despite the gremlins, has taken to the world stage like a duck to water.

He said:

It's been tough ... [but] I've enjoyed it a lot and the rallies have been good and the partnership I have developed with my co-driver Jeff Judd is great.

It's hard work and you certainly know you've been to an overseas rally. Unlike at home where the roads are pretty good and it's about how fast you can go, overseas it's about strategy and preserving the car. You've got to be smarter.

Another difference Tapper is finding is the depth of talent. Unlike in New Zealand, where only a few have any real chance of winning, on the continent it could be any one of eight or nine drivers who could stand on top of the podium.

First time out, Tapper caused a bit of a ruckus among the more established drivers by running consistently in top 10 and at times well inside the top five before something let go in the car. It was soon apparent Tapper was a real threat and could take valuable championship points away from the drivers contesting the entire series:

There's more depth in the P-WRC than there is in the WRC. If you look around the start field in a P-WRC round, there'll be at least six drivers who have won a race before and others that are more than capable of winning their first.

In Portugal when we didn't have any problems and decided to push we were always inside the top five and in a couple of stages inside the top three.

In the meantime, Tapper has decided he won't be going to watch the Rally of Wairarapa - it'll annoy the hell out of him sitting on the sidelines.

Photo courtesy of Rally New Zealand/Pirelli