VW's Polos dominate Osram rally
2010-08-23 11:23
After a fine victory in Barkley-East, Enzo Kunn now leads the local championship by nine points.
Author: Lance Branquinho
South Africa’s most isolated (and some would say spectacular) rally turned into the VW Polo show this weekend in the Southern Drakensberg.
The Osram rally, run as a single-day 164km event, is considered a true driver’s rally.
Admittedly the Osram is not much of spectator event due to the extreme distances involved getting to Barkly East in the first place.
To follow the actual event - which transpires over a hugely dispersed geographic area - is quite taxing too.
Despite this, those rally enthusiasts who did make the trek to the isolated Barkly East area were welcomed on Saturday morning to a faint-pink, first-light glow over the mountains surrounding the area. This provided some solace as it was terrifically cold (-3 degrees celsius) when the teams unpacked their service trucks and readied themselves for the day’s action.
Traditionally the Osram rally navigates some harrowing dirt road passes around the Barkly East area, providing some of the most spectacular drop-offs in local rallying.
This year’s event saw a slightly less forbidding route, yet the stages were long and fast – rewarding those who drove with abandon.
An early puncture ends the deadlock
With Toyota’s Johnny Gemmell and VW’s Enzo Kuun tied on points at the start of the event, any stage one misfortune was going to be crucial.
Gemmell suffered a puncture with 12km to go on stage one, losing half a minute in the process and dropping to tenth place.
Kuun was spectacular – winning stage one by 1.6 sec from team mate Hergen Fekken. The pace was akin to going all-in at the poker table.
Despite Gemmell's misfortune, Kunn did not slow down to consolidate his position in the championship. Charl Wilken became the first S2000 casualty as his Fiesta's transmission expired on stage one.
Fekken took stage two and the event lead after besting Kunn by 2.6 sec.
At this stage the rally was held up for nearly an hour as Namibian competitor Jaco van Dyk rolled his VW Polo after his co-driver Des de Fortier's commands were drowned out by a inexplicably wailing emergency buzzer.
Stage three started late and probably broke the momentum of the VW Polo team, allowing Toyota’s Mark Cronje a win.
Kuun took stage four before the teams lined up for the Osram rally’s deal-breaker - stage five, the 43km Wartrail special.
Fekken then made an error of judgement with his tyre choice for the Wartrail section.
On a shorter stage such a technical discrepancy would not matter as much, yet with nearly 50km of racing the issue was compounded. Ultimately the Wartrail special saw Fekken ceding the rally’s overall lead to Kuun after losing 24 seconds.
Toyota’s Johnny Gemmell produced an intensely focused performance at this time, to take his sole victory of the rally - quite fittingly on its longest stage.
Kuun carried a 19 second overall lead into stage six, which Fekken won 2.3 sec. The Pretoria engineer’s driving was spectacular (as one always expects) yet the nearly half-a-minute he lost to Kuun on the Wartrail section proved an impossible setback.
Running late...
As the cars lined-up for the penultimate stage seven, Barkly-East's mountains etched long shadows over the fields between them.
Jaco van Dyk’s accident on stage two had the rally running late and it was clear the last stage (stage eight), set to run as a spectator special on the edge of town, was not going to be executable.
A truncated rally is never ideal.
One of the consequences of this was that stage seven – which became the last stage by default – was run in golden light conditions as the day melted away.
Standing next to a farm fence I watched the S2000 cars being set off in the distance. The 2l engines resonated a chilling acoustic signature in the rarified air we were breathing at 1 800m. As the wailing of those four-cylinder competition engines (staggered by the magnificent meshing of straight-cut gears) passed me I found some solace in stage seven being run as the Osram rally’s last stage, even if it meant the rally was going to finish "short".
Fekken was by now assured of a finish (a relief for the man who has been harangued by differential-shearing rocks and other maladies throughout this year) and settled for second place overall behind his VW team mate. In no way did this diminish his commitment. The VW Polo driver four-wheel drifted his Polo past me through a downhill right-to-left complex not because it would gain him time, but because it was the principled rally thing to do.
Gemmell followed suit in his Toyota, unbalancing his car for a moment in the straight section between the two conflicting radius turns, before settling the Auris with a dab of opposite lock and running it true on a glorious four-wheel drift. Top man.
Beyond the high jinks of Fekken and Gemmell the top privateer, Conrad Rautenbach, won the last stage – scant consolation for a man who had a very subdued rally, yet finished third overall.
Despite the last stage being cancelle,d drivers still - very sportingly - put on a show for the crowd which had gathered opposite the Barkly East clubhouse with a few demonstration runs around a dirt track.
Kuun’s calculated driving and effortless pace now have him in an outstanding position to take this year’s championship with only two events to go. Gemmell’s early puncture put him out of the running and by the end of the Osram event Kuun left with a championship lead of nine points.
Give this man a S2000 car
Leeroy Poulter was mercurial yet again during the Osram event, besting Gugu Zulu’s 2l Golf in his 1.6l RunX.
Poulter’s achievement was even more credible given that he ran stage one without rear brakes and completed the rally despite an inflamed appendix. Unsurprisingly he’s wrapped-up the A6 championship with two events to spare and regularly puts the fear of god into some of the less committed S2000 drivers.
Osram is an isolated event. It is a good few hours from both Bloemfontein and East London – the nearest cities – and an epic trek is required to get from Johannesburg or Cape Town to get to Barkly East.
The surrounding area is spectacular though and if you happen upon the correct spectator point, you’ll see the local rally series at its best. Seeing Fekken and Gemmell drifting through turn three of stage seven made up for the near 5 000km round-trip I embarked upon to watch this year’s Osram event.
In four weeks time the Western Cape hosts its second event of the year, the Swartland rally. Although infinitely more accessible will it prove as spectacular a setting as the Osram event? Well, you’ll have to be there to find out, won’t you?
Osram Rally Results:
01 Enzo Kuun – 85:00.0
02 Hergen Fekken + 23.7s
03 Conrad Rautenbach + 42.6s
04 Jannie Habig + 48.2s
05 Johnny Gemmell + 01m 41.7s
06 Hein Lategan + 02m 25.0s
07 Visser Du Plessis + 03m 09.3s
08 JP Damseaux + 03m 19.7s
