In spite of winning Production Cars in their last three rallies from three starts at the tail end of the 2007 season, Charl Wilken and Greg Godrich are aware that the competition will be fiercer than ever this year.
“We learnt some valuable lessons about production car rallying last year”, says Wilken. “One of the obvious key lessons is to finish as often as possible. The Sasol/Konica Minolta Subaru was a state-of-the-art weapon last year but such is the pace of development in rallying in that it is no longer cutting edge”.
The Subaru Impreza STi has been re-fettled for the challenging eight round Sasol-backed championship, including a rebuild of the gearbox and shock absorbers.
Wilken and Godrich ended their season last year by winning the Scottair Rally overall, the final round of the KwaZulu Natal Rally Championship, which used roads similar to those that will be used on Saturday’s South Coast stages on the Tour Natal.
“Having run the KZN event may give us a bit of an advantage, but the rainy weather experienced across the country will have substantially altered the road surface, so I don’t expect much help there”, Wilken reckons. “The Natal stages are very fast, quite slippery and very technical but I suppose we will only know our true pace after the first few stages on Friday”.
“The toughest competition should come from Visser du Plessis and Fernando Rueda, both with newer machinery than ours”, predicted Wilken.
Heading into the new year with a brand new Prodrive Pirtek Subaru Impreza is the current champion Visser du Plessis and new co-driver Gerhard Snyman. This car marks Du Plessis as the favourite to retain his title, but he may take some time getting used to his new navigator. This could play into the hands of Capetonian Fernando Rueda, who also has a new navigator in Gert van Rensburg; this pair will have a newly re-shelled Team Total Mitsubishi Lancer at their disposal.
Du Plessis and Rueda won two and three rounds of the 2007 series respectively and will be the main threat to the Sasol/Konica Minolta team’s title aspirations.
Lola and Megan Verlaque return to the series in their Team Total Subaru, fresh from a podium on the Tanzanian Rally – the Rally Chicks should improve on their 6th in class on last year’s standings. Paul Pfeiffer and Cindi Harding will start the season with their tried and tested lightweight and still very potent Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 6 in the hope of picking up some points before receiving a new Subaru Impreza later in the season.
Rounding out the class N4 production car challenge is the Nelspruit team of Joos/Danie Stassen in their self-built (but Prodrive specification) Subaru Impreza. Short on experience, the brothers will find the going tough on their first foray into the Natal cane fields.
The big off-season production car news is the re-appearance of Ford in SA Rallying with a Dealer Team Total backed class N3 Ford Fiesta ST for Etienne Lourens/Andre Vermeulen. Former track racer Martin Steyn and co-driver Van Aardt Schoeman will tackle the event in a second Fiesta ST. The Fords will find out the hard way that class N3 is a tough nut to crack.
A ream of Toyota RunXs is set to fight to the last stage of the year for class N3 honors, headed by current champion Rodney Visagie in a Team Total RunX. Etienne du Toit/Patrick Vermaak, the current class N2 champions, will drive a brand new Sasol-backed Toyota RunX. Privateer Kosta Koumantarakis/Barry White return once more with their RunX in the hope of performing a giant-killing act with more determination than funding.
Zimbabwean Chase Attwell rounds out the N3 entry with another BNS-backed Toyota RunX and based on his first appearance in the car in October last year, is expected to give a good account of himself.
The NMCC organized Hitachi Tour Natal Rally starts in Umhlanga at noon on Friday and takes in 12 stages totaling some 220 km of all gravel competitive stages. Central service parks will operate in Stanger on Friday and at the Scottburgh Country Club on Saturday, where fans are welcome to meet the Sasol/Konica/Minolta Subaru team members.
