It was their best finish for the year in their Mitsubishi Evo 7, although the nine stages of the New Zealand Rally Championship's fourth round seemed never-ending for the pair, who were struggling to concentrate due to feeling ill, Gardner said.
''We were starting to fall asleep between stages.''
Timaru-based Chris West and co-driver Chris Cobham, in a Mitsubishi Evo X, won the event in the forestry reaches of Ashley and Okuku in northern Canterbury.
The majority of the day the event was headed by defending title champions Richard and Sara Mason in a Subaru STi - until the final few kilometres.
Forced to stop and change a disintegrated front left tyre, the time they lost moved the four following cars up a position, elevating Nelson's Ben Hunt and Tony Rawstorn (Subaru STi) to second with Christchurch's Matt Jansen and Grant Marra (Subaru STi) to third.
Christchurch's Richard Baddock and Jason Anderson (Subaru STi) finished fourth with the Masterton-based Mason's ending up 10th.
Dunedin's Emma Gilmour and Glenn Macneall parked their new generation Suzuki Swift Maxi on the second stage when it was discovered the source of the engine's overheating was a blown head gasket.
Gilmour said it was a ''disappointing weekend'' as the overheating was a recurring problem from the previous event that the team thought they had fixed.
Improvements to the new car's handling were encouraging but she would have liked to have enjoyed them over more mileage, she said.
