The Sabat rally team’s 2003 tale of woe took a turn for the worse this morning, when the Sabat Tazz suffered an engine failure while running in a brand new motor en route to the Sasol Rally. The team will thus not compete in the weekend’s event. –
– “What can I say?” a distraught driver Michele Lupini asked after the car stopped on the freeway near Middelburg. “In close to thirty years of motorsport, we’ve had some bad luck, but nothing quite as bad as our rally season in 2003.” –
– “We built a brand new engine using the all the best components, parts and engineering we could lay our hands on and had among the best engine builders in town put it all together this time in an effort to iron out our woes. “The guys worked flat out in the three weeks since Cape Town and through the night to get it all together – we have all the right stuff, but it isn’t holding together…” –
– “We never even got half way to the start…” navigator Garry Kingsley-Wilkins complained. “Clearly everything is going wrong, but that’s racing and we’ll press on – our luck has to change sometime – let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later…” –
– The Sabat team will regroup early next week to prepare for the next event in a month. “We’re not a superstitious bunch or anything like that,” Lupini concluded. “But we’re -probably going to change quite a lot before the next event in search of a little luck, so let’s hope we can find it…”