Johnny Gemmell and his Zimbabwean co-driver Peter Marsh were the provisional winners of the season-opening TOTAL Tour Natal Rally in KwaZulu Natal on Saturday afternoon, giving the class S2000 Toyota Auris its first outright national championship rally victory.
The two-day event, round one of the Sasol SA Rally Championship, was a race of attrition, with two of the favourites crashing out in the first special stage on Friday and the overnight leader rolling his car on to its roof on the second stage on Saturday morning.
Gemmell, who won three of the 14 stages and was never headed after early leader and Castrol Toyota Auris team-mate Mark Cronje rolled on stage nine, completed the event in a time of 1h 50m 23s.
Second, 2m 9s behind, was the Sasol/Konica Minolta Subaru Impreza of Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich, who won the production car category and class N4. They finished 11s ahead of reigning national rally champions Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries (BP Volkswagen Polo), who were second in class S2000 and won five stages. Fourth overall and second production car home was the class N4 Subaru Impreza of Hein Lategan and Johan van der Merwe, fifth were 2007 national champions Jannie Habig and Douglas Judd (S2000 BP Volkswagen Polo) and sixth was the Team TOTAL Toyota RunX of Fernando Rueda and Cobus Vrey.
High-profile casualties, apart from Cronje, who won three of the eight stages he completed, were 2006 champions Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson (BP VW Polo), who went out on stage one after hitting a bank and breaking a control arm, and Team TOTAL’s Jean-Pierre Damseaux and Andre Vermeulen (Toyota RunX), who slipped off the road just three kilometres into the first stage.
Damseaux returned to the fray on Saturday under the Super Rally rules (no championship points are scored) and won two stages and was second in another two.
The rally, organised by the Natal Motorcycle and Car Club, started and finished at the Sun Coast Casino in Durban and included four special stages on dirt roads in the Scottburgh area and two tarmac super special stages in Pinetown on Friday. The event returned to the Scottburgh area on Saturday for a further eight dirt stages, with a total stage distance of some 160 km.
