The South African Rally Championship delivered on the promise of excitement for rally fans with fierce competition amongst the top S2000 competitors in the Total Tour Natal Rally, the first event of eight in the 2011 season. As expected a number of new vehicles captured the interest of the fans including the two new Team Pirtek Peugeot 207s.

The first day of the event, run in the sugar cane fields on the Kwa-Zulu Natal South Coast, saw Mark Cronje put his stamp on the proceedings with a fierce charge through the first five stages. The nine special stages run on Saturday saw Conrad Rautenbach and then Jan Habig take up the chase with the lead changing three times in the final four stages with just tenths of a second separating these two as they went into the penultimate stage. In the end it was Rautenbach that prevailed in his Fiesta over the Polo of Habig with an advantage of just eight seconds after 150 kilometres of special stage competition.

The Total Tour Natal saw the introduction of the Peugeot 207 S2000 to South African rallying with two of these highly competitive cars entered for Visser du Plessis and Hein Lategan under in the Team Pirtek banner.

Visser du Plessis suffered the misfortune of rolling his Peugeot 207 on the shakedown stage prior to the event and without sufficient time to repair the damage before the start was forced to sit this one out. “We purchased my car from a team in Portugal and it only arrived in South Africa a week before we needed to leave for Natal,” says du Plessis.
“The guys in the team did a magnificent job of getting it prepared but a lack of testing time meant that we had to adopt a more aggressive approach to optimise our time on the shakedown stage than I would have liked. On one of the runs to evaluate a change to the setup the car rolled quite heavily. Fortunately the damage was limited to body panels on the right hand side and the rear suspension but was too extensive to repair before the start. The first impressions of the 207 are very positive – it’s certainly the quickest and most competent rally car I have driven. I’m really looking forward to settling into the car for the Sasol Rally in three weeks time.

Hein Lategan’s 207 was completed just hours before leaving for Durban and the shakedown stage provided the first opportunity for Hein to familiarise himself with this all new car that arrived as a kit of several thousand parts just three short weeks ago. “Our first test runs went very well,” says Hein. We were able to progressively fine-tune the handling as I gained confidence in the car.

“On the way to the start of the first special stage on Friday a wire on the alternator came adrift. We couldn’t fix the problem ourselves and assistance from the team is prohibited outside of designated service areas. We needed to run the first two special stages, just 18 kilometres, without the alternator charging. Unfortunately the voltage in the battery dropped off quite suddenly after about half of this distance, just after the start of stage two, and caused a number of electronic systems to malfunction. This brought our rally to an early end.

“Our first stage in the 207 was a good one in the circumstances. I was quite cautious to start off but still set a time in the top ten for the stage. There’s a lot more to come from me and the car. I’m confident we will be right on the pace with a bit more experience with the car.”