adminthe ace Zimbabwean motor rallying driver who failed to land the competition at the last hurdle during the MTN Polokwane Rally which was held here over the weekend.
The inaugural Polokwane Rally acted as the eighth and final round of the 2011 South African Rally Championship series in which Rautenbach initially made his presence felt in this tough competition by winning three of its first seven races held at different parts of South Africa during the course of the year.
This saw Rautenbach, who was having a Green Fuel Ford Fiesta S2000 as his main weapon for his assault on this year’s championship, raking up 125 points going into the last round of the competition – the Polokwane Rally, here at the weekend.
The talented, soft-spoken 27-year-old Zimbabwean driver arrived in Polokwane sitting pretty at the top of the 2011 South African Rally Championship Drivers’ Standings with his 125 points.
He was also enjoying a nine-point lead over his nearest title rivals, two of South Africa’s top motor rallying drivers Mark Cronje and defending champion Enzo Kuun.
Both Rautenbach and Cronje had won three events this year, while Kuun, with one second and three third places, was yet to win.
And Rautenbach needed an outright victory in the Polokwane Rally inorder for him to emerge as the overall Drivers’ champion of the 2011 South African Rally Championship, making him the first Zimbabwean to achieve this feat.
But that was not to be as Rautenbach stepped on a banana peel and slipped at the last hurdle in the Polokwane Rally in which he was forced to settle for fourth place, coming home one place behind one of his main title rivals – Cronje.
Rautenbach was 44 seconds off the much-needed top spot.
And this effectively saw the 2011 South African Rally Championship title slipping from Rautenbach’s grasp, leaving the young Zimbabwean driver a very disappointed man at the end of the Polokwane Rally at midday here on Sunday.
In fact, the final round of the South African Rally Championship ended in an anti-climax for Rautenbach and his French co-driver Nicolas Klinger who were effectively ruled out of the championship fight after their Green Fuel ethanol-powered Ford Fiesta had a puncture in the second stage of the Polokwane Rally on Day One of the competition on Saturday.
The punctured tyre cost Rautenbach a good 25 seconds and this later forced him to play catch-up on Cronje who eventually came third in this race and snatched the 2011 South African Rally Championship Drivers’ crown from the nose of the young Zimbabwean driver.
In fact, team Sasol’s Cronje and his navigator Robin Houghton clinched the 2011 South African Rally Championship Driver’s and Co-Driver’s championships – the first privateers in 45 years to claim the titles – after ending the MTN Polokwane just 2.7 seconds shy of their fourth victory of the year.
While Cronje was walking on Cloud Nine on Sunday after winning the Drivers’ title, it was all gloomy for Zimbabwe’s Rautenbach who was left cursing his luck after the eventful and incident-filled two-day Polokwane Rally.
Running first on the road on Saturday as the championship leader, Rautenbach found the going challenging and blamed his misfortune on the slippery roads. “The stages were incredibly slippery.
We’ve been first on the road most of the year but this was the worst as the surfaces were very loose.
“I tried hard not to clip any of the earth banks on the roads carved out of the bush,” Rautenbach told reporters after the race on Sunday.
Day Two of the event on Sunday morning was run in sweltering hot conditions and this might also have affected Rautenbach’s rhythm.
“I was trying really hard but I wasn’t driving at 110 percent because of the road surface. The repeated stages were better though.” But that didn’t stop him from giving it his best shot on Sunday, recording the fastest time on four of the day’s seven stages to close the gap to 26 seconds at the finish.
“We lost a lot of time through the kinks. I saw on the repeated stages how drivers basically straight-lined them. It was a good rally and very challenging in places,” Rautenbach later told one of South Africa’s most respected motor rally website, Rallyworld.net.
Shrugging off the disappointment, Rautenbach reflected on a year with three wins in the South African Rally Championship series and three in the FIA African Rally Championship, which he leads by 14 points with one round remaining. “We’ve had a good year overally.
“In hindsight, doing two championships was a tough task and probably hindered our performance in South Africa a bit. We had a slump mid-year but bounced back strongly.” One unresolved matter for Rautenbach and his Green Fuel Team is his exclusion from the Gauteng Rally for a rule infringement. According to reports from here in South Africa, a Court of Enquiry and subsequent Court of Appeal have upheld the exclusion, which the team is set to challenge. “In our minds we were were treated unfairly. I like to think we are honest and fair people, which may be our downfall. “Other people breached rules on the same event and received no penalty and that is the basis of our challenge,” Rautenbach told reporters after the Polokwane Rally on Sunday.
Online Reporter