THE BELA HAS BURST
I suppose this is a fitting end to year most of us will want to forget.
This has nothing to do with the fact that Hans Weijs pulled of a great win for Volkswagen on this event, but I can now understand the frustration Andries van der Walt had while I attended all the rallies prior to this one. I used to think that he was dramatizing – but this time around the frustration on rallies was replaced by an even worse frustration trying to inform readers about the sport.
At the time of writing this “report” which is a thumb-suck at best – we have not received any information of the second day of the rally, telling us what the hell happened to anyone on the event.
I am afraid that if MSA does not do something drastic about the present demise of the sport – we will not see much of it soon.
We have not heard of any problem, we have not received any more than an SMS of the final stage – we know what happened to one or two drivers on the event – but that is it.
For what it is worth – here is a few combined snippets we placed on our Facebook page as we received some scant news.
BELA BELA DAY 2
Leeroy Poulter carried on where he left off on Day One by winning the first stage on Day Two.
SS5 – was a fast but in places very tricky affair.
Weijs was now trailing by 17.5, Cronje 18.5, Fekken 39.3, Lategan 57.6 and as I thought last night Van Beurden is indeed leading class S1600 and not as shown by an early result on Day One – Coertse. Paulus Franken is also right there with the leaders.
In SS6 Fekken popped into the limelight and won the stage.
We all waited for this move, but maybe it was a bit too late to succeed in removing rival Hans Weijs from the second spot in the overall championship.
Hergen did reduce the gap between him and Weijs to 20.7s but there was simply too much to do with not more than about 60km of rallying left for 2014!
Cronje was now only 1.2s behind Weijs and at this time I predicted that if Weijs tried to fend off the Cronje attack we still may have a surprise shift in the Top3 championship positions coming.
This was not going to happen…
Special Stage 7 took its toll and we had a new leader – instead of fading under pressure Hans Weijs took over the lead in the rally after Leeroy Poulter blew the Toyota engine.
My prediction that Cronje would catch Weijs in SS7 was out by 0.8 of one second which meant that Weijs would without doubt step up his pace in the next stage. More pressure – more hope for Fekken that he may still be able to grab the second place bunny by the ears without the SPCA seeing anything.
Alas – Fekken dropped slightly back and all he could hope for was that Weijs would make a mistake while trying to give Volkswagen an overall win.
Giniel de Villiers retired in SS6 – reason still unknown to us.
Gugu is now in 4th and Himmel in 5th. More late
SS8 Weijs extends lead to 22s over Cronje after Cronje suffered a puncture.
30km to go. Power off in Pretoria.
Hanz Weijs and Bjorn Degandt won the rally. Mark Cronje and Robin Houghton on +22.5 in 2nd with Hergen Fekken an Carolin Swan third +36.5
Lategan finished a quiet rally for him in fourth spot +219.5 while Gugu Zulu was trailing by a massive 260.2.
Paulus Franken won S1600 after a steady drive with Ernie van der Walt 27.7s behind him.