2011 South African National Rally Championship

[crunch]

Interesting you mention your thoughts that the s2000 cars may become just too expensive for the sport.
Same sort of thing here in NZ.

However; the other side of the coin is that you think it makes your Championship stronger. Not sure I follow how a type of car can make it stronger, but do follow that the more competitors the better.
In New Zealand, we have a population of 4 million and last year our National Rally Championship had 36 entries, of which 24 were in FIA GroupN or older Group A cars. Most National Championship rallies here also run with an Allcomers/local field and have a total entry number of between 50 to 70
Interested to know how many FIA cars (N, A or S2000) you had in total

Does the assumption that you must run FIA classes make our respective domestic Championships stronger?

[Bruce D]

Crunch, we've gone through a few years of rallies been decided by minutes, so the advent of S2000 allowed rallies to be really close, which in turn means the drivers are committed 110%, which in turn looks far more spectacular now than before. Plus add in the fact that the cars sound awesome. I think what's helped us here is that 2 of the cars are locally built, the Polo and Auris, so the price is down a bit compared with the European models and they are competitive against the likes of the Fiesta. I personally, and I'm sure others will agree, have always found the N4 Imprezas and Lancers very boring to watch and they are very expensive to buy and run.

I would say our events averaged about 35 to 40 entries per event in total. The thing is normally the lower classes are very well supported and the top class has 3 or 4 cars, whereas now our top class was having about 16 cars per event and the lower classes were thinning out. It's a weird situation I've never seen before here.

We originally went over to the FIA classes in about 1998 because we were trying very hard to get a round of the WRC, and for some reason it was felt that if our classes were the same there would be a chance. However this brought in the complication and cost of homologations, something we never had before, it was just "these are the rules, make a car to fit one of them". Now it's been decided that the chances of getting a WRC event are zero for various (I always thought bleedingly obvious) reasons, so we're now looking into doing a combination of FIA and local rules which match the FIA rules, much like the British Touring Car Championship and their BTC cars matching the S2000 cars of the World Touring Car Championship. So to answer your question of whether it makes it stronger or not, I'd say in this case (S2000) it did, but in the previous case (Formula 2) it didn't, and we'll have to wait a few years to see if our future approach works too.

[Bruce D]

Apparently some big announcements coming this week - should be interesting.

[Grant_RSA]

i suspect i know what they will be, but lets wait and see, dont think anyone will be to shocked.

[Bruce D]

Hmm, going to stick my neck out and say that Total will be the title sponsor of the series and Peugeot is entering as a works team. Ok, maybe not the last bit but I have inside info on the first bit.

[Grant_RSA]

mmmm, we will have to wait and see , things will start happening now, were 31 days away from the season opener so its about time.

Hope your planning your spectating on the Total already :-)

[Bruce D]

I'm planning to watch the Saturday of the Tour. My father is the route director so we were running through the stages on Google Earth and he was showing me some non-spectator points that will be good to watch, so yeah I'll hopefully be there. I live in Toti too so the spectator special stage is only a quick 5min drag up the freeway for me.

It's quite funny looking at the T&D schedule - day 1 is lots of open section for very little stage, and day 2 is lots of stage for little open section. If I remember the first section from the start to the first service is 125km, only 17km of which is 2 stages.

[Grant_RSA]

Good thing our headsets have blue tooth, we can listen to some tunes on the LOONNNGGG open sections :-D

[Bruce D]

Hey Grant, love the photoshoot!



Actually it's pretty cool, nice to see a sponsor using their teams for promotion.

[Grant_RSA]

mmmmm, im blushing here :-)

Yes Total is looking to up the game drastically this year.