One of the lesser-publicised facts to emerge from amid the euphoria of Hayden Paddon and John Kennard’s breakthrough victory in Argentina was the news that the Marlborough man had just become the oldest driver or co-driver to win a World Rally Championship round.
It is an achievement the 57 year-old Kennard, who began his co-driving career in 1985, is justifiably proud of and added lustre to what he labelled as the undoubted highlight of his career so far. “It’s a record that will get broken pretty quickly though,” he said with a chuckle, “because we’ll go and do it again. Then the age will go up.”
The Kiwi duo’s victory in Argentina was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Closest rival, Sebastien Ogier, was breathing down their neck. He trailed by a tick over two seconds heading into the final stage, a tricky 16.3km section which the Frenchman had dominated the previous year, yet Paddon and Kennard produced a sensational run to better the world champion by a staggering 11.7 seconds.
Despite the fact they were so close to their first victory, Kennard said the pair had gone into the final stage with a relaxed attitude. “Hayden has been working with a driving coach in Norway and also Gilbert Enoka, who worked with the All Blacks, on the psychological side of it. Gilbert stressed to Hayden that if you get the process right, you will get the result, no matter what. So we went in with that sort of attitude, saying that if we do that stage as well as we can possibly do it, we will be close.”
After Paddon completed what he later described as “the stage of my life”, he asked Kennard for their time. The co-driver had clocked them at 13 minutes 7.9 seconds and Paddon pointed out that Ogier had recorded exactly 13 minutes to win the stage last year.
Thinking their effort would leave them short, they pulled up at time control where an official put a clipboard on the windscreen with the official times on it. Unfortunately Ogier’s time was at the bottom of the sheet and obscured by the wiper, leaving them the only people on the course unaware of the result. Even when the official eventually raised the board and the Kiwis read Ogier’s time they couldn’t believe it. “With the gap at 11 seconds, we thought, that can’t possibly be his time,” said Kennard. “Then I went ‘yes it is’ and I just laughed. Hayden said ‘what … we’ve done it’, then it just went mental as everyone outside the car realised we hadn’t known we had won.”
During last year’s Rally Argentina Paddon and Kennard made the headlines for all the wrong reasons after losing control on a corner and injuring some Argentine spectators on stage nine. This year there was no such problems, with crowd control being much improved.
Kennard said he and Paddon had put the incident out of their mind over the following 12 months, but received an unexpected reminder of it when bringing their Hyundai i20 into service one morning. “Three Argentinian guys were standing in the crowd shouting out to us so we went over. One guy pulled up his shirt and he showed us a decent-sized scar in his rib area. One of his friends who spoke English told us that he was ‘one of the guys who you ran over last year’. He was smiling and had this ‘badge of honour’ … it was just a different type of attitude, they told us all the people involved in the accident were fine.”
After achieving one of their major goals at such an early stage of the season, the obvious question now is, “can you go on to win the world championship?”
While Kennard stresses that the duo’s aim for the rest of the season is to do as well as they can in as many rallies as they can, with a view to storing up knowledge for future success, he admits the championship is the “next big box to be ticked.”
“For sure, I think he can win it,” added Kennard, who is enjoying a few days rest in Blenheim before heading to the stop on he and Paddon’s hectic schedule, the Rally of Portugal, beginning on May 19.
