Tauranga's Phil Campbell has made a consistent and solid start to the Brian Green Property Group New Zealand Rally Championship, overcoming a huge week for the team in the build up to the DriveSouth Otago Rally to come home in fourth place.

Photo: Jason Byrne.

Campbell suffered arguably the biggest accident of his career in the final round of the New Zealand Tarmac Hillclimb championship only five days before The Roofing Store Evo 9 was due at the event start in Dunedin, more than 25 hours drive away.

A huge effort from the team at Fraser St Panelbeaters and PF Automotive saw the car ready to go via a quick trip to The Sign Shack. In the end, the car made the start and looked as good as new.

In dusty conditions, Campbell and co-driver Venita Fabbro took an understandably conservative approach, still enough to sit in sixth place at the first service, then moved into fourth on the following stage. A big battle ensued across the afternoon and in the end Campbell would round out a solid day in fifth.

Day two started with a slight handling problem that would be traced to a problem with the differential pump, but Campbell was still able to move his way into fourth place after the opening stage. It was a position he would hold onto for the remainder of the event.

'I'm certainly pretty happy to put a decent haul of points on the board considering the amount of work that all the team put in leading up to the event,” said Campbell. 'Now we've got a solid base to work off and with a couple of rallysprints between now and Whangarei, we just need to find a little bit more pace to give the guys ahead of us a hard time.