Jon Armstrong’s run of five consecutive class wins in the European Rally Championship came to a sudden end with a heavy crash on the Barum Czech Rally that left the Kesh driver having to spend the night in hospital.

Going into the sixth stage of the event Armstrong had been dominating his class in the Ford Fiesta Rally3, and setting times that were closer than ever to the more powerful Rally2 cars, but his rally came to an abrupt end when he misjudged his braking and careered off the road into a tree.

“I got caught out with the braking,” Jon admitted. “It seemed to be a shiny surface that had melted, like melted tar. The stage before that didn’t really have any slippery parts so it caught me by surprise, and by that point there was not much I could do.

“The car locked up and I turned towards where I needed to go but the car went straight. I was heading for a tree and tried to go around it but ended up hitting it with my side. I think we were doing 140 kilometres per hour on the straight, and I didn’t really slow down too much, so I was probably doing 120. “

The sudden stop left the 29-year-old briefly unconscious and trapped in the car.

“I was knocked out, so I didn’t know too much about the impact,” he recalled. “The cage and the pillar were up against my head and I couldn’t get out, but I managed to slip out of the helmet and down and out of the car.

“I was very lucky to get away without being injured, with how much the whole structure of the car had come down around me. I’m just trying to recover from a bit of back pain and concussion now.”

Jon spent a precautionary night in the local hospital before flying home, but he is taking the positives from a weekend that saw him post some of his best stage times of the season before disaster struck.

“We got some good stage times for the team and a lot of people have now seen the potential of what you can do in one of those cars,” he said.

“I was really close to the Rally2 cars, under a second a kilometre. I was really enjoying those stages.

“They really suited me down to the ground, and I was really enjoying how I was going.

“The car was going well, and the team did a really good job, and everything was going nicely with the pace notes.

“On the longest stage we were a second per kilometre down (on Rally2 cars), but on the stage we crashed I would have been even better. I was 0.85 down so we would have been under 10 seconds behind on an 11k stage so it would have been nice to get to the end of that one. At least we got a few good stages before it went wrong.”

With the Rally3 European Championship title already secured, Jon did not have any events scheduled for the rest of the year, but he is keen to get back behind the wheel as quickly as possible.

“I wasn’t really supposed to be doing the final round of the championship anyway,” he revealed. “There might be one event, but we will see. It’s hard to know now, but after a couple of weeks I will probably have a better idea of what I’m doing.

“Plans are to try and put together a Rally2 package for next year, but that was always going to be a hard challenge. It would be good to get back behind the wheel, even if I am not on the absolute limit straight away. It would be good to get back in the saddle in some way.”