Ford will have a frontline presence in the South African National Rally Championship next year, once again fielding a Ford Fiesta S2000 for 2012 and 2013 champions, Mark Cronje and Robin Houghton.
The pair, who took a record seven wins from eight starts in 2013, will seek to make it a hat trick of championships in what will also be their fifth in a Fiesta – a period which has netted them no less than 15 victories and seen them dominate the statistics in terms of fastest stage times: since changing to a Fiesta they have won approximately 40 percent of all the national championship rally stages run.
“We’re thrilled to be driving for Ford again, and will go into the first round of the 2015 championship determined to return to the kind of form that saw us dominate in 2013,” says Cronje. “Last season was not the one we wanted, and while we stood on the top of the podium on two occasions, the year started badly and it was difficult to recover from that in what is a very competitive series.”
To ensure that everything is in place come the Tour Natal at the end of February, the Fiesta S2000 has already been shipped back to M-Sport’s UK headquarters, the internationally-renowned builder of the Fiesta and the company which spearheads Ford’s rally efforts worldwide. The car will undergo a full strip-down and rebuild, and receive the latest round of research and development upgrades along the way.
It is going to be a particularly busy year for Cronje, and when not behind the wheel of #24 he’ll be pushing prams, his wife, Kirsten, expecting fraternal twins (a boy and a girl) in May. Expect him to be determined and focussed irrespective of what he’s driving.