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Total's team survives the mountains
Jean-Pierre Damseaux and Carolyn Swan (Toyota RunX) led home a full team of finishers for Team Total on the tough Osram Rally.
The event, sixth round of the 2010 Sasol South African Rally Championship, is always a tough challenge for the country's special stage racers with its fast, sweeping roads and dizzying drops off high mountain passes in the Southern Drakensberg of the Eastern Cape. It's all about bravery and complete faith in the directional calls of the co-driver.
All three of Team Total's entries reached the end of the testing one-day event over 165 km of gravel special stages. Another top-ten finish by Damseaux/Swan in their premier class S2000 car saw the pair consolidate second place in the race for the title of top 'privateers'. They finished eighth overall and eighth in class. The top 12 places were all occupied by four-wheel-drive S2000 cars.
Mohammed Moosa and Grant Martin were 10th overall and 10th in class S2000 in their Toyota RunX, finishing ahead of the factory Toyota Auris of Mark Cronjé and Robert Paisley.
Another steady drive by the ever-consistent KwaZulu-Natalian Craig Trott and co-driver Robbie Coetzee netted them a second in class A6 and 21st overall in their two-wheel-drive Toyota RunX. They are now second in the contest for 1600 cc cars. Their team mates Fernando Rueda and Dave Lewkowicz missed this round as Cape Town-based businessman Rueda was recovering from pneumonia.
Overall winners were Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson in a class S2000 BP Volkswagen Polo, who finished 23,7 seconds ahead of team-mates and defending champions Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries. Third was the first privateer entry of Zimbabweans Conrad Rautenbach and Peter Marsh in a Ford Focus.
An engine misfire on the 14-km Vaalhoek stage four lost the Damseaux/Swan duo valuable time and although the service crew attended to the electrics at the service stop immediately after the stage, the misfire returned on stage five. Fortunately there was another service stop after this stage and the problem was finally rectified.
Moosa and Martin suffered a puncture on their Toyota on stage two on Saturday morning and they were forced to complete the last seven kilometres of the gravel stage on a flat tyre. A misfire on the same stage, combined with the flat tyre, lost them about half a minute.
Trott and Coetzee were unfortunate to be among almost half the field delayed for an hour on stage two as a result of one of the cars crashing heavily and its driver being airlifted to hospital for observation.
The next round of the championship is the Swartland Rally in the Western Cape on 17 and 18 September.
