Photos: Peter Norton

The Tumut Toyota backed O’Malley Rally heads to Victoria this weekend with renewed confidence and a valuable championship opportunity at the Ada River Rally, following a standout result at last month’s Rally of the Bay.

James O’Malley and co-driver Jono Forrest delivered one of their strongest performances of the season at Batemans Bay, bringing the Tumut Toyota 86 home fifth outright and first rear-wheel-drive car in a highly competitive field.

The result added another 35 points to O’Malley’s tally, moving him to sixth in the 2026 New South Wales Rally Championship with 66 points, within striking distance of several crews ahead of him.

Now attention turns to the Ada River Rally around Noojee in Victoria, where there is considerably more than just another rally result on the line.
Ada will be contested as three separate NSW Championship heats, with up to 25 championship points available in each heat. With only 10 NSW Championship crews making the trip south, a strong and consistent weekend could have a significant impact on the championship standings.

O’Malley currently sits just five points behind Dennis Stanford in fifth, seven behind Bethany Cullen in fourth and 10 behind third-placed Josh Redhead.
With Cullen not contesting Ada River, the opportunity is there for O’Malley to move further up the championship order before the season reaches its closing rounds.

“The Bay actually started off a bit shaky. We hadn’t done a lot of competitive kilometres in the lead-up, so I didn’t have full confidence in the car on a new tyre, and honestly I was a bit shocked by others’ pace on stage one,” O’Malley said.

“We had to find another gear. From there we just chipped away at it. And as it goes with these rallies, cars drop off, they all have their own dramas, and a lot of the time being there at the end is everything.”

The three-heat format offers a rare chance to bank a large haul of points in a single weekend, something O’Malley is keen to take advantage of after a difficult start to the season.

“Three heats is great for us, although there’s been a bit of contention around the format and I can see both sides of it,” O’Malley said.

“It’s a fair trek for pretty much anyone from NSW to get down there, so having that reward on offer in the points standings is great.

“We’ve already effectively dropped two heats after only completing one stage at Narooma, so this is an opportunity to make that gap up in some way.”
The championship picture is also likely to change further as the season progresses and the series’ dropped-round provisions come into play, making strong individual heat results particularly valuable.

Since Rally of the Bay, the Toyota 86 has been through another round of maintenance and preparation for the demanding Victorian roads.
“We spend a fair bit of time between events on routine maintenance, replacing diff bushings, trailing arms and anything else that’s copping a beating,” O’Malley said.

“At the end of the day it’s still a production-based machine, being driven harder than it probably should be, so we’re quite frequently throwing parts at it. But having Wall-fab and Pallister Motorsport in our corner is key to it all.”

Beyond the championship stakes, the trip south also represents new territory for the crew.

“We’re just really excited to rally in a different state on different roads,” O’Malley said.

“From everything we can tell, it’s a really good event, and the roads are great. I haven’t spent a great deal of time looking at others’ onboards, so it’ll be a whole new experience, up against a handful of cars we’ve never come up against before.”

The Draper’s Civil Contracting Ada River Rally will be held this Saturday, 22 August, based at the Noojee Heritage Centre in Victoria’s West Gippsland region. Organised by the Western District Car Club, the event will feature approximately 180 kilometres of competitive rallying across eight stages and three heats, taking crews through the forest roads surrounding Noojee and continuing into the night. The event is a round of both the Victorian Rally Championship and the Shamrock Haulage NSW Rally Championship, adding an extra dimension as competitors from the two states go head-to-head on some of Victoria’s demanding gravel roads.