Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich have an enviable record of success under their belts with a 64% win rate and an 80% finishing record over the last 50 events, which the team hopes to improve upon in what promises to be a challenging 2009 Sasol SA Rally Championship season.
The production car category has shrunk in line with the prevailing economic climate but the intensity of competition will be as fierce as ever.
Wilken and Godrich are typically reserved about their chances of success this year, but remain quietly confident.
“We start the new season with a brand new, advanced piece of equipment and it will take a while to extract the maximum performance from the car. It is the same model Prodrive-built car that Visser du Plessis ran last year, so he already has a year’s experience on us. Having said that, we will have the services of a Prodrive engineer at our disposal, and a very capable team behind us, so I believe we will be right up there challenging for wins from the start”, Wilken explained.
The N4 champion driver continued: “We’ll run the Tour Natal Rally as an extended test session in that we’ll fiddle around with various settings as there won’t be much time to test before the start, our car only arrived the Friday before the event. If we’re there or thereabouts, then we’ll go for it, but at the end of the day, we want a good helping of points. Last year we led convincingly until a small mistake put us in a river, so I feel there’s unfinished business there”.
The main competition to the Sasol/Konica Minolta team this season will come from the Afrox Subaru of Hein Lategan and Johan van der Merwe. Like Wilken, Lategan is a former circuit racer, ultra smooth and lightning quick.
Lategan initially ran a Golf TDi before buying his latest car, which put him on the pace of the front runners, although it took until round 5 before Lategan claimed his first win of the year. The Afrox car has been fully re-fettled for the rigours of the season ahead by renowned motorsport technician Freddie Pretorius.
Visser du Plessis, the 2007 production car champion, and co-driver Gerhard Snyman return to the class N4 and production car wars with their Pirtek Prodrive car, now hopefully sorted out after a catalogue of issues blunted their challenge last year. Du Plessis remained winless last season and will be going flat out to remind onlookers that he was a champion and can be again.
Joos and Danie Stassen start their second full season in their De Goede Finance Impreza, having shown considerable pace in 2008, in spite of the modest resources at their disposal. The Nelspruit brothers have steadily added the right ‘go-faster’ bits from the Prodrive catalogue and learnt the ropes the hard way – through sheer will and determination, which should see them score well in the coming year.
The 2007 class N2 champion, Mike Nathan has stepped up to the top production car class with a Mitsubishi Lancer. Experienced co-driver Derek Jacobs should speed things up, as demonstrated in the opening round of the Western Cape Regional Rally series, where the pairing powered the Mitsubishi to 2nd overall.
An unknown quantity in class N4 is the Zimbabwean pairing of Chase Atwell and Dave Milner in a new, self-built Impreza. Attwell has graduated from class N3, where he earned a reputation for crashing, having written off three cars in three events. The bigger cars bite hard, so expect some circumspect from Attwell, whose main target this year is the African Rally Championship and the Pirelli Star Driver award that accompanies success in the ARC.
Class N3 is a shadow of its former heyday with just two entries for the Total Tour Natal Rally. Dave Compton and new co-driver Pierre Jordaan debut the Sasol Toyota RunX and should have things pretty much their own way. Compton is in his second season of rallying, (having graduated from circuit racing), where he proved to be competitive proposition winning in the baby A5 class twice and remaining in title contention until the penultimate round.
Riaan and Hester Erasmus have bought the championship-winning Toyota RunX vacated by defending class N3 champion Rodney Visagie and should be a worthy opponent for Compton.
The Erasmus’ ran in class N2 last season, pedaling their Corolla to the under-subscribed championship. The East Rand pair is very capable though, having cut their teeth in the Northern Regions Championship.
The Total Tour Natal Rally starts from the Suncoast Casino at 10h00 on Friday, 13 March, heading down the South Coast to Scottburgh and Umzinto, where the day’s stages will run. The highlight of Friday’s action will be a pair of SuperSpecial stages through the streets of Pinetown at 18h00 and 19h00.
Saturday’s 8 stages are all run over the South Coast sugar plantations. The 15 stage, 747km rally ends at the Suncoast Casino on Saturday afternoon.