Photo caption: Kenneth Quirk left, with his navigator for the Circuit of Kerry, Daniel Cronin
New York, New York, so good he came home to rally twice.
To come home from New York at short-notice for one rally is remarkable enough.
To do it twice in the space of a month shows unprecedented dedication.
But that is exactly what Kenneth Quirke from Camp, County Kerry is doing.
Quirke has been living in the Big Apple for the last three years. Last month he arrived home unannounced, his first visit home since he moved to New York, in time for the Rose Hotel Circuit of Kerry, his home event.
Despite the jet-lag he finished fourth in Class 12 driving his father Martin’s Talbot Sunbeam.
He returned to New York the Monday after the Tralee-based rally and had no firm plans to come home again in the near future.
That all changed over the weekend when he heard that his Kerry Motor Club colleague Darren Young was without a navigator for the weekend.
The Honda Civic driver is currently second in the Moriarty’s Centra Kingdom of Kerry Rally Championship so starting this weekend’s Cartell.ie Rally of the Lakes is vital to his championship aspirations.
“I booked the flight on Saturday night and will arrive in Shannon Airport on Friday morning, “said Quirke who is also an accomplished Gaelic footballer and was recently named as the Kerry GAA club in New York club person of the year. “I could not let my old friend down. We won the junior section of the West Coast Rally Championship before and I wasn’t going to see him stuck.”
Quirke is not the only competitor making the trip from New York. Galway native Liam Egan, a regular visitor to Killarney and a former East Coast of America Rally championship frontrunner will also tackle the event in his Ford Fiesta.
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