The next challenge for the Century Property Developments Racing team is the Limpopo 400, round six of the Absa Off Road Car Championship, which takes place in the Polokwane area on Friday and Saturday (September 12 and 13).
The Gauteng-based team will field two entries in class A of the special vehicle category. Mark Corbett and Rudi Balzer will be making their fifth appearance in the radical CR1, the only four-wheel drive car in class A. Colin Matthews and Alan Smith, buoyed by an excellent second place overall in the recent Sun City 400, will be seeking their first win in the premier class in the ex-Mark Corbett BAT.
The Century Racing CR1, which has been designed and built by the team at its workshops near Kyalami, is still very much in the developmental stage and has yet to show its full potential. Uniquely, it features all-wheel drive and a turbo-charged four-cylinder engine mounted transversely at the back.
“We’re making good progress,” says team owner Mark Corbett. “We’ve done a lot of testing and development, but the best way to learn is in actual competition. We’ve already seen, particularly in the last event, that we have the power and the speed to win, but the CR1 is a brand new – and ambitious – project, quite unlike anything else in the competition, and we have to be patient while we explore its possibilities and sort out the teething problems one has to expect.
“This is only our fifth outing in the CR1 and, to date, we haven’t really managed as many racing kilometres as we would have liked. The team has put in a lot of hard work over the past weeks and now it’s time to get our first result.”
Matthews and Smith, who missed the first two rounds of the championship, put themselves into contention with a great run in the class A BAT at Sun City. They were in a strong position to win their first event of the year before the engine’s supercharger belt came off while they were leading the Porter of eventual winners Shameer Variawa and Siegfried Rosseau during the first half of the race. They did well to recover from sixth after the mishap to finish just two minutes behind the winners.
The pair finished second in last year’s Limpopo 400 and went on to secure third overall in the championship after also finishing second in the final two rounds.