Busy Champs for BP VW
February 26, 2010 by ProMotor
THE 2010 South African national rally season sees the Volkswagen team ready to explode into action, determined to take no prisoners. First event on the calendar is the Total Tour Natal – a rally that proved a dramatic and unwelcome start for the team last year and something they aim to put right this time around.
Much speculation has surrounded the team’s 2010 season, starting with the sponsor. The Volkswagen factory team will continue to carry the green and blue livery of BP Ultimate this year – a relationship that has proved itself a winning combination, racking up championship victories season after season.
With the arrival of the new Volkswagen Polo there is an obvious change coming for the rally team later this year. Along with that will be a new livery – still in BP Ultimate colours. While construction and development is taking place, the team will continue with their existing rally cars.
In addition to the new BP Volkswagen Polo rally cars for the S2000 class and the new livery later this season, there are more immediate changes inside the cars. The championship defending duo of Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries go into battle side-by-side again this year, ready to fight off all pretenders to their throne for a third season.
For Jan Habig and Douglas Judd a long road together came to an end with the announcement of Judd’s retirement earlier this year. Habig will campaign with navigator Ralph Pitchford who has most recently competed in the punishing Dakar Rally – navigating to a third place overall along with American Mark Miller.
Local rallying is vastly different to the long-distance endurance that is the Dakar and Pitchford faces a steep learning curve. While Habig has expressed confidence in Pitchford’s abilities, this is still going to be a hard season for the duo as they get up to speed as a team.
For Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson the rally stages will continue to be racked up together and their aim is to improve on their finishing position of last year. Their first rally incident in 2009 will undoubtedly loom over them in the opening stages of the Tour Natal but their focus is on the 2010 event and they are not competitors who get bogged down in the mud of difficult moments.
In the A5 class Gugu Zulu has a new navigator – Shaun Visser – who will join him in the hot seat at this first event of 2010. Zulu’s previous navigator, Carl Peskin, has moved on to the S2000 class and will compete alongside Theuns Joubert in a four-wheel drive Volkswagen Polo.
For André Cleenwerck there is also a new navigator in the seat. This is Kesevan Naidoo who replaces Cleenwerck’s navigator of last year, Des de Fortier.
There are also changes ahead for the A5 BP Volkswagen rally competitors this season. Their cars trusty BP Volkswagen Citi Golf A5 rally cars will be replaced by the successor to the VW Citi Golf. The production version of this new model will be announced the week after this first event in Kwa-Zulu Natal, only then can work begin on their new rally cars.
Once the new cars have been completed, then there is the long road of tweaking which lies ahead as the cars are developed for the national rally scene.
The BP Volkswagen rally team challenges the stages of Total Tour Natal on Saturday and Sunday, 6 and 7 March with the three Volkswagen Polo S2000 entries and two Volkswagen Citi Golf A5 entries. Day one of the event will see the team competing in the Stanger area while day two takes place in KZN’s South Coast.
While the first event of the season looms for these competitors, it has already been a crowded year for the team. As preparation moves into action, the year is set to become even busier.
There is certainly an element of disruption to everything that has already happened – and what is still to happen – this season, but any of the opposing teams who think this will affect the performance of the BP Volkswagen team out on the stages had best reconsider. The team has won championship after championship to become the standard by which all are measured on the national rally circuit.
For 2010 this will be no different as the green and blue cars are ready to set the pace, right from the start.
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