Top five Toyota Dealer Cape Rally finish for Weijs Jnr and Degandt
Volkswagen Sasolracing’s Hans Weijs Jnr and Björn Degandt rallied their Polo S2000 to fifth place overall at the South African Toyota Dealer Cape Rally on 20 September. An incident on stage one saw the duo hit a pole, costing them almost a minute in time.
They pushed hard for the remainder of the event and won stage 10 as a result.
Weather conditions on the Western Cape event varied between wet and muddy on the Friday to hot and dry on the Saturday, keeping the teams on their toes. The event almost has two distinct halves – mostly tar stages take place on the first day with gravel tracks on day two.
‘We made a few changes in the setup for this rally,’ said a disappointed Weijs Jnr. ‘The event has changed since I first competed here two years ago and the changes did not work for us – that cost us time as well out on the stages. ‘A top five finish is good, but not nearly good enough for us.’
Team-mates Gugu Zulu and Carl Peskin finished day one in fifth place overall, less than a minute behind the rally leaders. Zulu praised his and Peskin’s Polo S2000, which performed flawlessly during the first day.
Creating opportunities for them to push their pace during day one to run with the leaders, they had to retire on the second day due to damaged rear suspension.
‘On Saturday morning we were pushing hard, but were slightly off-line over a series of jumps and we damaged our rear suspension in stage six. Unfortunately that ended our rally right there.’
The other Polo of Henk Lategan and Barry White ran consistently during the event, the pair holding their ground against the opponents. Stage 11 saw them eliminated when they too unfortunately hit a pole.
‘The rally was going quite well,’ said Lategan who had to compete while still recovering from a broken hand. ‘Unfortunately in the second-last stage we hit a very slippery patch and by the time I could regain steering we were already too close to the pole to avoid it.’
Other Polo finishers included Paulus Franken and Henry Kohne who took their Manitou Group Polo S1600 R2 to eighth place overall, and Andrew Heine and Robbie Coetzee whose S1600 VW completed the event in 10th place.
The Volkswagen Sasolracing-backed S2000 car of Thilo Himmel and Armand Du Toit came home 12th, while AC Potgieter and Tommy du Toit’s Polo S1600 finished 16th.
The next round of the South African National Rally Championship, the Polokwane Rally, takes place around Polokwane in the Limpopo Province from 17-18 October.
