The Retirement Fund Solutions Racing team had a good weekend in the Free State with the RFS pairings of Christiaan du Plooy/Henk Janse van Vuuren (Toyota Hilux) and Hannes Grobler/Hennie ter Stege (BMW X3) finishing third and fourth in the inaugural Human Auto 400.
It was Du Plooy and Janse van Vuuren’s best result of the year following sixth place finishes in the Adenco 400 in March and Sun City 400 in July. For Grobler and Ter Stege, who won the recent Toyota Kalahari Botswana 1000 Desert Race, it was a result that moved them up to second place in the championship with one round remaining.
In one of the most exciting and close-fought finishes of the season, the race was won by Chris Visser and Japie Badenhorst in an RFS-supported Toyota Hilux, who took the chequered flag just one second ahead of the factory Ford Ranger of Neil Woolridge and Kenny Skjoldhammer and 27 seconds in front of the RFS Toyota.
Visser and Badenhorst have all but wrapped up the championship with just the RFS-sponsored Magalies 400 next month remaining. Grobler and Ter Stege are second, 25 points in arrears with a maximum of 25 points remaining. Du Plooy and Janse van Vuuren are seventh.
Du Plooy and Janse van Vuuren had started Saturday’s 370-km race in the Bloemfontein area in 10th place in the production vehicle category after Friday’s 66-km prologue. With problems encountered by several of the competitors in front of them, they gradually moved up through the field to lie third overall 122 km into the first of the two laps that made up Saturday’s race.
They reached the designated service point at the halfway stage at the Windmill Casino complex outside Bloemfontein in second place behind Pieter Ruthven and Rudi Britz (Toyota Hilux), but dropped to third when eventual winners Visser and Badenhorst caught and passed them. They were back up to second after Ruthven encountered problems and were looking at a career-best result when disaster struck just a few hundred metres from the finish.
Rain had periodically fallen throughout the race and a violent storm hit the finish area shortly before the arrival of the leading cars, turning the roads into a quagmire. Du Plooy and Janse van Vuuren were among several caught out by the tricky conditions and they broke a steering arm after sliding off the road and into a ditch. This allowed the Ford of Woolridge and Skjoldhammer through and they had to settle for third place.
Grobler and Ter Stege started the race in third place but fell back to ninth in the production vehicle category (and around 20th in the combined field of production and special vehicles) after two punctures on the first loop. “We lost so many places that it was difficult to make our way back up through the field in the dust,” said Grobler. “We managed to catch most of the cars that had passed us while we stopped to repair our flat wheels, but we just ran out of time.”
The final round of the championship is the RFS Magalies 400 in Gauteng on November 19 and 20.
– Credit: Peter Burroughes Communications.