Jon Armstrong’s Junior WRC campaign looks to be over for this year after just one event, with the Kesh driver struggling to put together a budget to allow him to compete on the remaining rounds of the series.

Armstrong suffered a heavy crash in Sweden on the opening round before the pandemic postponed the remainder of the season.

Organisers have now released a restructured schedule with three remaining rounds in Estonia, Germany and Italy spread out over an eight week period, but Jon admits it is unlikely that he will be among the starters on September 4.

“It’s looking like I won’t be doing too much for the rest of this year,” he admitted.

“There are three rallies in the space of a couple of months so it is quite hard financially because there is not much time between the events to get extra budget sorted.

“It’s maybe a more sensible plan to see how everything goes and make a plan for next year instead and see how successful I am in getting a budget together.

“We will see how it goes. You never really want to get your hopes up in this game because until you are on the start line you never know if you are going to be there. There is so much money involved before you get anywhere near a start line on a rally, never mind a WRC rally, but I am starting to work on it now. It is by no means going to be easy but I am hopeful that I should be able to get something sorted, and if I can’t then it might be time to focus on smaller things or more local rallies, but we will see what happens.”

Jon had hoped that this season would see him make a crucial breakthrough among the World’s elite young drivers and he had put a lot of work into getting his finances in place, but his plans were thrown into doubt even before the current restrictions came into effect.

“I was struggling anyway,” Jon acknowledged. “I had thought I had a backer paying for the full season but those plans fell through early in January, which left me in a sticky situation because I was registered for the championship and my name had been announced for it. I managed to get the budget together for Sweden from other backing and a bit of my own money as well and I was hopeful that I would be able to go to the next round as well, which was Sardinia. Then everything got shut down. I guess it was a bit of a messy plan to begin with and then Sweden turned out really bad.”

His major, high profile accident in Sweden looks like being his final moment of a fraught season.

Despite the lack of pre-event testing for that rally, he showed enough speed to give him encouragement that if he can get on a level playing field with his rivals, then he can compete for rally wins in the future.

“I know if I can give it a couple of stages or even one rally to get into the swing of things, then hopefully I will be able to be on the front pace for the rest of the year. It’s just shaking off that rustiness,” he said.

“A lot of the guys I’m racing against have their own cars or access to a car and they can do a lot more testing than I can. That’s what makes it a little bit tricky. I dropped 30 or 40 seconds on the first two stages to the leader in Sweden and then on stage three we were bang on his pace. That was partly getting confidence, but the big thing was adjusting the car set up between stages and it seemed I was getting a lot more traction on stage three.

“It was just unfortunate that we made that mistake in the pace notes. I think I would have no problem being on the front runner’s pace and in the mix for wins.”

Elsewhere rallying is starting to get back underway, and although there are no major events in the UK or Ireland to date local drivers are starting to re-appear on the stages of Europe.

Brian Hoy partnered Callum Devine in two Italian events recently, and the pair are back in action this weekend in the Latvian Rally, the next round of the European Rally Championship. Barry McNulty is also scheduled to return to action, navigating for Cathan McCourt at Rally Ypres in Belgium in October.