Hein Lategan and Visser du Plessis gave the two Team Pirtek Peugeot 207 S2000s their best results of the season in the Toyota Dealer Gauteng Rally over the weekend. Both drivers displayed a higher level of confidence and speed in these all-new cars to the South African rally scene, posting a number of very competitive stage times on their way to sixth and eighth places overall.
Hein Lategan posted two top three stage times with and regularly featured in the top five times through the course of the event on his way to sixth place overall. Visser du Plessis scored the best individual stage result yet for the Peugeot 207 in local rallying with the second fastest time on special stage seven on his way to eighth place overall.
Hein Lategan: “We are at last seeing the benefit of all the hard work put in by the team over the past few months as we adapt to the Peugeot 207 and fine-tune it to our local conditions. Ahead of the event we were confident that we had moved ahead quite a bit in optimising the car. We finished the Friday leg ahead of championship leader Conrad Rautenbach and were involved in a tight tussle with him for a time on Saturday before he retired from the event. This showed that when we are able to put a series of good clean stages together we are very competitive in the Pirtek Peugeot 207. We had two stages where we lost time because of punctures. The first flat cost us 40 seconds. The second, in the second last stage of the event, was a more serious incident where the tyre bead separated from the rim without warning and we lost steering control in an instant. We went quite far off route and came back with our vision obscured by a broken windscreen. We lost a minute here. Without these incidents third position and a place on the podium was a possibility.
Visser du Plessis: “A very encouraging result for us as we found ourselves a lot closer to the front of the field. The second quickest time for us on stage seven shows that we are starting to unlock the true potential of the Peugeot 207 S2000. We had a relatively clean run through the event aside from a flat in the first stage on Saturday morning. That cost us around 50 seconds and we incurred a 20 second penalty for lateness between stages as well. Without this lost time we were good for a sixth overall and that was the objective I had set myself for this event. Aside from the lost time we had a trouble free event and again the 207 was a joy to drive. There is still more to come from myself and the car as we move on into the second half of the season.