Osian Pryce was happy after bagging third place on the season opening Prestone British Rally Championship event.

The Welsh rally ace shrugged off losing time with several punctures with a solid podium finish at the Border Counties Rally.

Pryce, winner of last year’s World Rally Championship feeder series Drive DMACK Fiesta Trophy, is blending a world programme with an assault on this season’s BRC – a series he has twice finished runner-up in.

But this season he has stepped up to a Hills Ford/Alphera-backed Fiesta R5 in his pursuit of domestic and global glory.

Pryce and co-driver Dale Furniss arrived at the start of the event on the back of a successful pre-event test and admitted he was still feeling his way into the Spencer Sport-run Fiesta for the first half of the rally.

A step-by-step approach worked perfectly and resulted in him scoring fastest time on the event’s penultimate test, the second run through the Elibank stage.

“I’m happy with this result,” said Osian. “If you consider that, just a few weeks ago, we were sitting with our sponsors Hills Ford and Alphera working out the best way to go about this season – and in the intervening time we’ve sourced the car and a team and scored a podium.

“That’s a pretty good result as far as I’m concerned.”

A puncture just a handful of corners into the second of two Friday night stages cost him dearly.

“We lost the left-front tyre after about 10 corners,” added Pryce. “There was a big cut in the sidewall, something had sliced it right open.

“That left us six miles or so to drive on a flat. We lost around 35 or 40 seconds. To be honest, that was where we lost the chunk of time. The other two punctures didn’t cost us much time.”

Despite a sixth-stage deflation, Pryce came out of the Yair stage grateful to still be in the rally.

He added: “We hit the same rock as David Bogie, but it put him out of the event. It was a proper, football-sized boulder that was right on the line; it was going nowhere. There was a big bang when we hit it with the front-right.

“That did the tyre and the track-control arm, forcing us to do the last part of the stage with the wheel jammed back into the wheel arch.

“We’d also had an intercom problem in that loop – I couldn’t hear Dale all of the time, I was snatching the odd note here and there. I was shouting back to him that I couldn’t hear him, but he couldn’t hear me!”

Spencer Sport fixed the car – and the intercom – at the ensuing Newtown St Boswells service, allowing Pryce to go out and beat everybody in the last-but-one stage.

He said: “We’d been building the pace through the rally, we had a really good pre-event test; we didn’t do a whole load of miles, but we made change after change to the set-up.

“When we got to the start, I couldn’t believe how good the car felt. To be honest, I didn’t really trust that it could be that good and offer that much stability and traction.

“I drove one of these cars on Rally GB, but it wasn’t anything like this. Credit has to go to Spencer Sport for preparing a fantastic Fiesta for us.

“The priority for me on this rally was seat time. I made a deliberate decision not to go too hard too early.

“I don’t have anything like the experience of these cars that the other guys have around me and I needed to get to the finish to build my confidence in the car.

“I built the speed as the event progressed and that meant we were able to go fastest in stage eight. I was happy with that.

“There’s more to come from me and from the car. Honestly, we’re nowhere near where we can be with this thing which is why I’m really chuffed to be coming away from round one with good points on the board and a podium in the bag.”

Border Counties Rally
Result: 3rd
BRC position: 3rd
Based: Jedburgh
Service Newtown, St Boswells
Stages: 9
Total distance 270 miles
Competitive distance: 60 miles
SS1: 5th fastest (5th overall) solid start to first stage of the season in new car
SS2: 11th fastest (7th overall) front-left puncture costs 40s
SS3: 3rd fastest (4th overall) happy enough with first daylight stage in new car
SS4: 4th fastest (4th overall) couple of moments, pace notes a bit too optimistic
SS5: 4th fastest (4th overall) intercom problems, Osian can’t hear Dale clearly
SS6: 3rd fastest (3rd overall) puncture and broken TCA
SS7: 3rd fastest (4th overall) clean run to third quickest
SS8: fastest (3rd overall) first fastest time despite puncture
SS9: 2nd fastest (3rd overall) rounds off BRC opener with fifth top-three time