The Ford Performance crew of Mark Cronje and Gerhard Snyman in a Ford Fiesta will start the second day of the Toyota Cape Dealer Rally in Malmesbury tomorrow morning with a lead of 18.6 seconds over second placed Henk Lategan in a Sasolracing Volkswagen Polo R. The rally is the penultimate round of the SA Rally Championship.
Before the start of the event in Killarney in Cape Town this morning, the talk has always been that Cronje and the Team Castrol Toyota Yaris of Leeroy Poulter would dominate proceedings as the two fought for control on the top of the leader board of the SA Rally Championship. They both started with the same number of points — 72.
But then on stage two of the four completed today by the 34 entries, disaster struck Poulter when he demolished the left back wheel of his Toyota in the pit complex. Poulter hit a curb and then a wall and that was that.
He dropped down from 2nd overall and lost more than two minutes on the leader. What made things worse was that there was no service between the finish of the fourth stage and the start tomorrow so Poulter and his co-driver, Elvene Coetsee, was left with the virtual impossible task of trying to salvage something that will enable him to carry on.
His only other alternative would have been to continue the event under Rally2 rules tomorrow, but he needs every single point that he can get before the final event later in the year if he wants to retain his title hopes.
It is not yet clear what the position will be.
The top scores are:
Cronje 17:59.5
Lategan +18.6
De Villiers +19.3
Fekken + 30.5
Van der Walt + 39.1
Kuun + 1:01.1
Zulu + 1:16.5
Botterill +1:50.1 (leader of class S1600).