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Less than a second (0.7 to be exact) was all that stood between Johnny Gemmell and Jan Habig after 13 stages and 187km of severe forest gravel racing that made up the Rally of South Africa, round four of the Sasol South African Rally Championship.
And the casualty list at the end of day one read like a who’s who of rallying, with no less than eight cars removed from proceedings in the killer 56km long Jessievale stage.
Fekken, Kuun, Rautenbach, Wilken, Joubert and others all failed to emerge from the forests, leaving the Castrol Toyota team in command, Mark Cronje/Robert Paisley in a healthy 30 second lead over Gemmell and Sturrock and Hein Lategan/Johan vd Merwe (Pirtek Toyota Auris) in a podium place. Even that didn’t last long…
Gemmell and Castrol Toyota’s first win of the season was anything but straight-forward for he saw a comfortable lead whittled away by some bizarre incidents on day 2. He also never set the fastest time in single stage, while Sturrock, at 21 years and one week old, became the youngest winner of a national rally.
Cattle?
When Gemmell took the lead in stage 5, he was stuck in thick dust from his ailing team mate, which cost 32 seconds. There was a large herd of cattle in the road in stage 7 which cost more time but the most bizarre incident happened in stage 8, when a seat anchoring bolt sheared after hitting a jump very hard.
Gemmell lost consciousness for a brief moment and has no recollection of how the car stayed on the road nor cleared the stage. Sturrock said: "It was so close to going off into the trees; I didn’t know what had happened to Johnny – very scary moment, that."
Going into the first of the two super special stages, the once comfortable lead was down to 17-odd seconds. In the first run Gemmell lost 10 seconds because of dust and sun while in the final stage, lost another 7, leaving the narrowest of victory margins ever.
Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries (BP Volkswagen Polo) set the pace in the opening stage of the rally, taking a one second lead over Conrad Rautenbach/Peter Marsh’s Ford Fiesta before Mark Cronje/Robert Paisley took a pair of stage wins in their Castrol Toyota Auris in stages two and three.
VW had a rather unhappy rally with both Fekken and Kuun retiring.
Jessie took its toll
Stage three, the notorious Jessievale stage that is the longest in SA rallying, saw Enzo Kuun/Guy Hodgson retire their BP VW Polo with a dead engine without any warning.
Fekken then entered the stage but hit a rock 4.5km in which forced their retirement with a deranged suspension. Rautenbach, fourth on the road, hit a rock while the suspension was under compression and the gearbox casing cracked. That was three out of four!
Rautenbach ran Saturday’s stages under the ‘Superally’ rules and set five fastest stage times from the day’s nine stages.
Habig, 5th on the road, nearly made it a clean sweep of retirements for the BP VW squad in the same stage for he had a huge moment that saw the Polo nearly roll after hitting a bank, but he survived with a badly damaged left front and rear suspension and driveshaft damage.
Luckily, a 45-minute service in Warburton saw the hard-working VW technicians repair the damage and Habig could continue to his eventual second place.
Charl Wilken made a welcome return to local competition with his smart looking Fiesta S2000 car, unfortunately he retired too...
New Fiesta rocked out
Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich, driving their new Basil Read/Bizhub Ford Fiesta, hit a rock with 10 km to go. The impact split the rim, so when the crew stopped to change the tyre, just the outer half came off, the inner part of the rim firmly wrapped around the brake caliper, preventing the wheel from rotating. Four retirements from the first seven on the road.
Wilken and Godrich also re-entered the rally but retired a second time after clipping a bank that bent the Fiesta’s suspension in stage 8.
With Toyota Aurises filling the top three places on the leaderboard, it took just 850 metres of Saturday’s opening stage to change that.
Cronje, running first on the road and with cold brakes, hit a bank on a ‘left 6 over crest’. He and Paisley replaced the tie rod after completing the stage, but with no service before the next stage, the Auris’ castor rod failed and it was game over, leaving Gemmell in front.
This meant none of the top four on the Sasol SA Rally Championship log took any points away from the weekend, while Gemmell rocketed into 2nd place, just 4 points adrift of Kuun, while Habig is now 3rd a further 10 points back.
Privateer Hein Lategan ran as high as second place before rolling.
Cruel luck for Lategan
Hein Lategan’s Pirtek Toyota Auris was up into 2nd, his best ever placing and with a sniff of a possible win, kept going hard, setting the fastest times of all in stages four and six. It ended in tears for the Pretoria engineer, who rolled end-over-end in stage 8, fortunately without harm to the crew.
This left Habig in second place, with Jean-Pierre Damseaux/Carolyn Swan up into third, the Team Total Toyota RunX pair enjoying their best outing since this event last year.
Damseaux had a late scare, limping through the SuperSpecial stages with suspected differential problems. Their result propeled them to the head of the inaugural Privateer’s Rally Championship. The second Team Total Toyota RunX of Fernando Rueda/Dave Lewkowicz ended 4th overall, their best result since the Spaniard moved into the S2000 class.
Rueda had no clutch for the entire second day, starting the car at each stage on the starter motor. The starter was replaced as a precaution during the day, but Rueda was aware that any stall or overshoot would result in him walking out of the stage.
Namibian Jaco van Dyk/Des de Fortier (S2000 VW Polo) finished an excellent fifth overall after strong showings all year. The pair tackled Jessievale with no power steering, which cost them 5 minutes, but thereafter ran a faultless rally.
Track racing star Leeroy Poulter finished seventh overall - in a front-wheel drive RunX.
Poulter brilliant - again
Mohammed Moosa and Grant Martin put their bad start to the year behind them to take sixth place in their Team Total Toyota RunX. Their power steering failed halfway through stage one and without service before stage two, lost more time. The team took ten minutes of service lateness and were stuck in other competitors dust for 40km in stage 3, leaving them 14th overnight.
Leeroy Poulter/Henry Dearlove once again put in the drive of the rally, bringing their class A6 Imperial Toyota RunX home 7th overall and the first front wheel drive car home, as well as winning the 1600cc championship category. Their only issue was a flat tyre in the first stage.
The Sasol South African Rally Championship takes a seven week break over the World Cup, resuming on 23 and 24 July with the Volkswagen Rally in the Eastern Cape.
And the casualty list at the end of day one read like a who’s who of rallying, with no less than eight cars removed from proceedings in the killer 56km long Jessievale stage.
Fekken, Kuun, Rautenbach, Wilken, Joubert and others all failed to emerge from the forests, leaving the Castrol Toyota team in command, Mark Cronje/Robert Paisley in a healthy 30 second lead over Gemmell and Sturrock and Hein Lategan/Johan vd Merwe (Pirtek Toyota Auris) in a podium place. Even that didn’t last long…
Gemmell and Castrol Toyota’s first win of the season was anything but straight-forward for he saw a comfortable lead whittled away by some bizarre incidents on day 2. He also never set the fastest time in single stage, while Sturrock, at 21 years and one week old, became the youngest winner of a national rally.
Cattle?
When Gemmell took the lead in stage 5, he was stuck in thick dust from his ailing team mate, which cost 32 seconds. There was a large herd of cattle in the road in stage 7 which cost more time but the most bizarre incident happened in stage 8, when a seat anchoring bolt sheared after hitting a jump very hard.
Gemmell lost consciousness for a brief moment and has no recollection of how the car stayed on the road nor cleared the stage. Sturrock said: "It was so close to going off into the trees; I didn’t know what had happened to Johnny – very scary moment, that."
Going into the first of the two super special stages, the once comfortable lead was down to 17-odd seconds. In the first run Gemmell lost 10 seconds because of dust and sun while in the final stage, lost another 7, leaving the narrowest of victory margins ever.
Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries (BP Volkswagen Polo) set the pace in the opening stage of the rally, taking a one second lead over Conrad Rautenbach/Peter Marsh’s Ford Fiesta before Mark Cronje/Robert Paisley took a pair of stage wins in their Castrol Toyota Auris in stages two and three.
VW had a rather unhappy rally with both Fekken and Kuun retiring.
Jessie took its toll
Stage three, the notorious Jessievale stage that is the longest in SA rallying, saw Enzo Kuun/Guy Hodgson retire their BP VW Polo with a dead engine without any warning.
Fekken then entered the stage but hit a rock 4.5km in which forced their retirement with a deranged suspension. Rautenbach, fourth on the road, hit a rock while the suspension was under compression and the gearbox casing cracked. That was three out of four!
Rautenbach ran Saturday’s stages under the ‘Superally’ rules and set five fastest stage times from the day’s nine stages.
Habig, 5th on the road, nearly made it a clean sweep of retirements for the BP VW squad in the same stage for he had a huge moment that saw the Polo nearly roll after hitting a bank, but he survived with a badly damaged left front and rear suspension and driveshaft damage.
Luckily, a 45-minute service in Warburton saw the hard-working VW technicians repair the damage and Habig could continue to his eventual second place.
Charl Wilken made a welcome return to local competition with his smart looking Fiesta S2000 car, unfortunately he retired too...
New Fiesta rocked out
Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich, driving their new Basil Read/Bizhub Ford Fiesta, hit a rock with 10 km to go. The impact split the rim, so when the crew stopped to change the tyre, just the outer half came off, the inner part of the rim firmly wrapped around the brake caliper, preventing the wheel from rotating. Four retirements from the first seven on the road.
Wilken and Godrich also re-entered the rally but retired a second time after clipping a bank that bent the Fiesta’s suspension in stage 8.
With Toyota Aurises filling the top three places on the leaderboard, it took just 850 metres of Saturday’s opening stage to change that.
Cronje, running first on the road and with cold brakes, hit a bank on a ‘left 6 over crest’. He and Paisley replaced the tie rod after completing the stage, but with no service before the next stage, the Auris’ castor rod failed and it was game over, leaving Gemmell in front.
This meant none of the top four on the Sasol SA Rally Championship log took any points away from the weekend, while Gemmell rocketed into 2nd place, just 4 points adrift of Kuun, while Habig is now 3rd a further 10 points back.
Privateer Hein Lategan ran as high as second place before rolling.
Cruel luck for Lategan
Hein Lategan’s Pirtek Toyota Auris was up into 2nd, his best ever placing and with a sniff of a possible win, kept going hard, setting the fastest times of all in stages four and six. It ended in tears for the Pretoria engineer, who rolled end-over-end in stage 8, fortunately without harm to the crew.
This left Habig in second place, with Jean-Pierre Damseaux/Carolyn Swan up into third, the Team Total Toyota RunX pair enjoying their best outing since this event last year.
Damseaux had a late scare, limping through the SuperSpecial stages with suspected differential problems. Their result propeled them to the head of the inaugural Privateer’s Rally Championship. The second Team Total Toyota RunX of Fernando Rueda/Dave Lewkowicz ended 4th overall, their best result since the Spaniard moved into the S2000 class.
Rueda had no clutch for the entire second day, starting the car at each stage on the starter motor. The starter was replaced as a precaution during the day, but Rueda was aware that any stall or overshoot would result in him walking out of the stage.
Namibian Jaco van Dyk/Des de Fortier (S2000 VW Polo) finished an excellent fifth overall after strong showings all year. The pair tackled Jessievale with no power steering, which cost them 5 minutes, but thereafter ran a faultless rally.
Track racing star Leeroy Poulter finished seventh overall - in a front-wheel drive RunX.
Poulter brilliant - again
Mohammed Moosa and Grant Martin put their bad start to the year behind them to take sixth place in their Team Total Toyota RunX. Their power steering failed halfway through stage one and without service before stage two, lost more time. The team took ten minutes of service lateness and were stuck in other competitors dust for 40km in stage 3, leaving them 14th overnight.
Leeroy Poulter/Henry Dearlove once again put in the drive of the rally, bringing their class A6 Imperial Toyota RunX home 7th overall and the first front wheel drive car home, as well as winning the 1600cc championship category. Their only issue was a flat tyre in the first stage.
The Sasol South African Rally Championship takes a seven week break over the World Cup, resuming on 23 and 24 July with the Volkswagen Rally in the Eastern Cape.