Rally privateer Japie van Niekerk is looking forward to the flagship event on the South African calendar – the Sasol Rally – which gets underway in Sabie on Friday April 17. The rally has a special significance for Van Niekerk: he lives just down the R537, in White River, so this is quite literally his home event.
With 15 stages totalling 202 km and overall event distance of 584 km the Sasol is longer and more demanding than any other, and has a reputation for being tough on man and machine. There are also two thrilling tarmac stages – Nelspruit’s popular Super Specials – where pairs of cars start simultaneously and go head to head on.There are five tarmac stages altogether.
The rally starts at 10 am on Friday with a 16 km test to blow out the cobwebs, followed by an intense quartet of forest stages around Sabie that total 100 kilometres of flat-out driving. The day ends with two short tarmac sessions that bring the locals out in force to line the streets of Sabie and White River respectively. Saturday gets underway with the Super Specials, split by a run around Nelspruit’s Mbombela Stadium, after which competitors can head for the service point and change their set-up for a series of long, hard challenges out in the forests.
For Van Niekerk and Ulsterman Gordon Noble it will be a second opportunity to get to know each other, having teamed up for the first time on the Tour Natal Rally in late-February, taking the New Africa Developments Ford Fiesta S2000 to fifth place on their debut. Both agree that the recce sessions on Wednesday and Thursday before the event will be especially valuable for them, and they will get the opportunity to drive most of the stages and refine their pace notes.
“It was a steady start for us in KZN, and it really was like dancing with a new partner!” says Van Niekerk. “Gordon has massive experience as a navigator at the highest level and I’ve been rallying for a decade, so it wasn’t as if anything was alien to either of us, but there is plenty of nuance and subtlety which goes into building a great combination.
“Afterwards we had a good debrief over a couple of beers before he jumped on the plane back to Northern Ireland, but we reached the conclusion that there really is no reason why we shouldn’t have a realistic shot at a podium on every event – and that’s what we’re aiming for in the Lowveld
Picture by: Eric Buijs