HIGH SPEED GAMBLE FOR SASOL/KONICA MINOLTA TEAM IN WESTERN CAPE

18-19 September 2009

Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich, the 2009 Production Car and class N4 champions head into the 7th and penultimate round of the Sasol South African Rally Championship facing a gamble regarding their road position on the BP Ultimate Rally, which takes place in Cape Town and the West Coast areas of Malmesbury and Moorreesburg.

With six production car victories from six starts, the Sasol/Konica Minolta Prodrive team is 4th on the overall championship log having stormed to a 2nd and 4th place this season and find themselves wedged between the factory VW Polo of Jan Habig/Douglas Judd and the Toyota Auris of Mark Cronje/Robert Paisley. Freed from production car championship pressures, Wilken and Godrich are angling to close down the points deficit to the works VW pair over the final two rounds of the series.

Wilken acknowledges that as a privateer, it won’t be easy taking on the might of the factory Volkswagen team and their multiple champions but reckons the Sasol/Konica Minolta team is up to the challenge. “We’ve beaten them before so it is possible but it won’t be easy. Working against us is that we have passed Jean-Pierre Damseaux on the seeding list and we now fall into the net that allows the top six seeded drivers to choose their road position for both days”.

The double production car champion has strong views on the system: “It is grossly unfair and South Africa is the only country in the world to use this system of determining road position. The top seeded driver chooses first in a lucky draw that has seen the 6th seeded driver draw number one three times this year. On most rallies, if you are first on the road, you have no chance of challenging the leaders because the road surface is so slippery and you lose massive amounts of time. If I want to gamble, I’ll go to a casino, not a rally”.

“If I have to be first on the road, this is a good rally to do it on because there is only one short gravel stage on the first day; the rest of the stages are tarmac and we have been strong on tar this year, so we’re aiming to be first or second at the end of day one so we can choose a more advantageous road position for the rally proper on Saturday”, Wilken said of their plan to beat the system.

“The stages used for this rally are very good, with fast, flowing roads that aren’t too hard on the car”, Wilken said of the day two route. “I hope there aren’t too many ‘dip/jumps’ because the Prodrive N14 doesn’t have the same wheel travel as the old car – the back tends to kick up like the Toyota RunXs did which makes it dangerous to tackle them too fast. The rally is quite compact which is great because over a season, we’re saving a rally and a half in distance, which means huge cost-savings for everyone”.

Challenging for the class N4 stakes is Tjaart Coetzee and Etienne Lourens in their Diesel Technic Impreza. Coetzee, competing in his first season of national rallying having started in the sport last year, claimed a maiden podium on the Sasol Rally in what has been a demanding year and if the car allows, he should be a strong contender for another visit to the champagne zone.

Coetzee’s biggest threat will come from Capetonian businessman Mike Nathan and Derek Jacobs in their AWI Mitsubishi Lancer. Nathan is contesting the Western Cape Regional Championship and just needs to finish to claim the title so no heroics are expected from the Mitsubishi team.

Another class N4 pair in the Cape series is John Peiser/Brian Hoskins in their Speed Cycling Components Impreza. The former Cape regional champion is outclassed by the Mitsubishi but could well end on the podium.

Dave Compton and Pierre Jordaan have clinched the class N3 championship with two rounds to spare so like Wilken, they have bigger fish to fry on the BP Rally, and will be looking to exploit the Sasol Toyota RunX’s prodigious top speed to mix it with the modified class A6 teams and see how far up the order they can finish.

Compton will come under attack from two crews armed with a vast arsenal of local knowledge in the form of former Western Cape champions Abduraghman Amlay/Yusuf Ganief (Toyota RunX), who ended second in class last time they met in April, as well as Duncan English/Rob Williams in another Toyota RunX.

The BP Ultimate Rally starts at 15h00 from Burchmore’s in Montague Gardens and heads into the only gravel stage of the day at the N7/Potsdam interchange before taking in two tarmac stages at Killarney.

Day 2 takes crews to Malmesbury for a 28km stage (later repeated as stage 7 run in the reverse direction). Two back-to-back stages in Moorreesburg precede the Malmesbury repeat, while the rally’s first stage is re-run as the final gravel stage. The rally ends with a thrash around the Killarney racetrack.