Six of the best for Sasol/Konica Minolta team.

22 August 2009

The Sasol/Konica Minolta team continued their domination of the Production Car category of the Sasol South African Rally Championship with a storming performance on the Osram Rally, which saw the 2008 and 2009 Production Car Champions, Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich involved in a mighty four-way fight for 4th place overall.

In an event not expected to suit the team’s Prodrive Production car due to the ultra-high speed nature of the sweeping gravel mountain pass stages, Wilken was pleasantly surprised not only by his outright pace but their ability to race with – and beat – the faster factory S2000 crews from Volkswagen, giving the pair a well-earned 4th overall after 170km of challenging stages in the mountains around Barkly East and Lady Grey.

This earned the Sasol/Konica Minolta team their sixth consecutive Production Car and class N4 win, arguably the most satisfying of the year due to the intense battle. The one-day event started badly for Wilken who soon discovered the car had a loose wheel with 12km of the opening stage to run.

Joubert’s Pass is a 45km long sliver of snaking road encircling Lady Grey high in the surrounding Witteberg mountains, not a place for the faint hearted and not a place to have any form of handling problems. “I felt there was something wrong but couldn’t identify what it was, so we backed off a bit over the last part of the stage”, said Wilken. In spite of this, the pair recorded the 6th fastest stage time…

Both factory Volkswagens of Hergen Fekken/Pierre Arries and Jan Habig/Douglas Judd experienced problems in the first stage that cost each a time loss of around two minutes and left them behind the flying Sasol/Konica Minolta car in 10th and 7th places respectively.

Wilken knew the VW teams would be racing flat out to make up time and vital championship positions so put the hammer down to record the 3rd and 2nd fastest times in stages two and three respectively. It was satisfying for the top privateer team to beat some of the ‘mighty’ works teams, with Wilken heading Habig in stage 2 and both Habig and Fekken in the following stage.

After stage 4, Wilken was 19 seconds to the good in 4th place overall and controlled his pace to manage the gap. Habig took 6 seconds on the following two stages but Wilken struck back in the final stage, taking back 2 seconds to keep his hard–fought place by 9 seconds.

Team Director Flip Wilken said: “This result is particularly satisfying because we could beat some of the mainstream S2000 cars in a straight fight. We had just two service personnel while the factory teams had their usual hordes of technicians”.

Tjaart Coetzee and Etienne Lourens ended second in class N4 and 20th overall in their Diesel Technic Subaru Impreza after encountering gearbox problems.

Dave Compton/Pierre Jordaan clinched the class N3 title in their Sasol Toyota RunX with their 5th win from six starts. This leaves the two Sasol-supported cars first and second on overall Production Car Championship points log.

Tony Barbosa/Kenny Hill brought their N3 Pro-Beat Autobody Ford Fiesta ST home 2nd in class.

The 7th and penultimate round of the Sasol SA Rally Championship is the BP Ultimate Rally in the Western Cape on 18 and 19 September.