Comfortable win for former champions on first event of the season
Former South African champions Evan Hutchison and Danie Stassen are no strangers when it comes to leading the Special Vehicle points log in the Donaldson Cross Country Championship, and find themselves in familiar territory after the opening round of this year’s series.
Hutchison and Stassen, in the Motorite BAT Viper, started this year’s campaign with victory in the RFS Endurance in Harrismith, and will be well pleased with a fast start to a Donaldson series that this year has been reduced from eight to six events. A revised scoring system with all six events to count, as opposed to previous years where crews had to drop one result, provides the Motorite crew with an early seven point cushion over Lance Trethewey and Geoff Minnitt, in the LTE BAT Venom.
A demanding route and wet and muddy conditions on the RFS Endurance contrived to make life difficult for the Special Vehicle brigade, with only seven cars making it through the 196 kilometre qualifying event and two loops of 251 kilometres that made up the race. Five of the classified finishers were Class A entries with two Class P teams also seeing out the full distance.
The final podium place behind Hutchison/Stassen and Trethewey/Minnitt went to Jimmy Zahos and Zaheer Bodhanya in the Cobalt Stryker. It was their best national series performance to date, with the pair finishing ahead of fourth placed Steve Parker and VZ van Zyl in the Sizanani Jimco with the leading quartet all Class A runners.
Fifth in the overall standings are KwaZulu-Natal crew James Watson and John Thompson (BAT) who put together a solid race to also win Class P. Watson and Thompson edged out Mark Corbett and Juan Mohr in the Century Racing CR5.
Behind Corbett and Mohr a second Century Racing crew, Colin Matthews and Rodney Burke, completed the classified finishers and were second in Class P. Matthews and Burke won the qualifying race in convincing style, but rear suspension problems four kilometres from the end cost them the Class P victory.
In the Class A standings Hutchison/Stassen lead Trethewey/Minnitt, Zahos/Bodhanya, Parker/van Zyl and Corbett/Mohr with 18 points separating first and fifth. The Class P standings provide Watson/Thompson and Matthews/Burke with a telling early season advantage over those who fell by the wayside.
The next event on the Donaldson Cross Country Championship calendar is the Sugarbelt 450 sprint race in Eston, in KwaZulu Natal, on May 8 and 9.