Brian Hoy had a frustrating re-start to his rally season, with back to back events in Italy both ending in retirement.

Returning to the navigator’s seat alongside driver Callum Devine after the enforced lay off, the pair travelled to Rome for the opening round of the European Rally Championship, but in blisteringly hot conditions they failed to get any points on the board after mechanical failure after the third stage.

“We needed to be scoring points so that was disappointing,” admitted the Enniskillen co-driver.

“There is so much uncertainty about which rounds are going to run or not run that there is no allowance for dropped scores, and we would have needed a strong result because tar is our surface.”

The pair tested their Hyundai R5 in Donegal before the event and completed an official test before the competitive action started, and they were confident they could make an impression on their Junior ERC rivals.

Despite temperatures inside the car approaching 60 degrees and the pair having to take salt tablets to counter dehydration, they were within touching distance of the competition after the first two stages, but problems on stage three brought their rally to a premature end.

There was little time to linger on the disappointment as they made the journey to Alba, south of Milan, for a second successive weekend of competitive action.

The event was not a round of the European Championship but the entry was packed with quality drivers keen to impress Hyundai boss Andrea Adamo in his home town.

Ireland’s Craig Breen would go on to win the rally, but Devine and Hoy were on the fringes of the top ten after three stages, just over 20 seconds off the pace of the World Championship driver.

“On Saturday morning the pace was very hot and we were probably a second a kilometre off,” said Brian.

“On the second loop we got it gathered up again and we were only maybe three or four seconds a stage off the pace, which was maybe half a second a kilometre, but we ran wide on a corner and clipped a wall and ran down a wee bank and we were stuck there. That was it.

“All the boys in the Junior academy were there as well as us, but to be fair other than Jari Huttunen we weren’t too far away from the rest of them. We were performing alright until that moment.”

Despite the disappointment of having nothing to show for their efforts, Brian acknowledged that it was a good learning experience for the pair.

“It was a great experience.

“We were running in equal machinery to Craig Breen and Dani Sordo and those boys who are more or less professional rally drivers.

“It’s nice to grade yourself against them because that is the only way you will ever get better,” he said as he reflected on their first visit to Italy.

“The first day in Rome was very mountainous and very much like some of the Killarney stages.

“The first stage was 21 kilometres and it was class. It was just the width of the car for most of the stage. Alba was more like Northern Ireland roads.

“They were more like main roads but they still had a lot of hairpins. It was all about the cuts.

“The stages were run three times and on the second pass there were massive cuts and if you weren’t in the cuts you were in the dirt on the road and probably sliding into the hedge. It was an unforgettable experience.”

The next round of a packed European rally Championship comes in less than two weeks’ time with the Latvian round of the series. Brian and Callum are hoping to get another test in before the loose surface event, but Brian is expecting another tough challenge in unfamiliar conditions.

“It will be a test because Callum has done very little gravel in an R5 so it will be hard,” he said.

“Latvia is flat out gravel. I asked Oliver Solberg because he won it last year and he said that in Latvia you don’t break, you just get into top gear and keep steering!”