PoloDriver

The BP Volkswagen rally team scored favourable results in the penultimate round of the 2012 South African National Rally Championship, the Polokwane Rally on 6-7 October. Although high temperatures and fast stages took their toll on many competitors, the Gugu Zulu and Carl Peskin claimed the S2000 Challenge title with their Polo Vivo S2000. Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries finished second overall, the pairing’s best result of the season so far, and the BP Volkswagen team’s third podium place of the 2012 series.

The 2012 S2000 Challenge victory marks the fourth time that Zulu has won a national rally title, and one he and Peskin claimed with one round of the season still to go. ‘It is always a great feeling to win a rally title,’ says Zulu. ‘I think we’ve done well this season, achieving the inaugural S2000 Challenge victory was done with a lot of work from my team and with the help of my co-driver. The season did have its ups and downs, and on this rally we didn’t finish where we wanted to, but we did win the championship,’ he continued.

‘We had a very good event,’ said Fekken said of his and Arries’ second place finish. ‘We changed a gearbox on Friday but other than that it was a good, clean event with no surprises. Starting so low down the order on Saturday (ninth on the road on day one) wasn’t ideal, but it worked out for us and we did well because of it. On Sunday we aimed for second place on the event, and we achieved that. It is a good result for the team.’

Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson displayed the pace which has kept them at the sharp end of the field this year, with onsistently fast times among the top three places during the opening stages of the event. Unfortunately they were unable to complete the rally and have shifted their focus to the final round. Hans Weijs Jnr and Bjorn Degandt are doing the same, after fatally damaging their Polo S2000 with a hard landing following a jump.

The Polo S1600 entry of Megan Verlaque and Hilton Auffray looked strong out on the stages, and the duo showed commitment on the event but were plagued by punctures on the first day of the event. Overcoming these setbacks, they finished fifth in the S1600 class. Elsewhere, Japie van Niekerk and Gerhard Snyman finished fourth overall in their privateer New Africa Developments Polo S2000, after finishing day one in sixth place.

‘The new BP Volkswagen Polo S2000s are doing better with every event,’ said Mike Rowe, head of Volkswagen Motorsport. ‘The rewards for the effort expended have been slow in coming, but I think we’re over those hurdles now and am confident we’ll be up to our standards by the start of the 2013 season.’ The final round of the 2012 South African National Rally Championship will see the BP Volkswagen Polo rally team head to the Western Cape for the Garden Route Rally on Friday and Saturday, November 2 and 3.

Following last month’s successful outing at Rally GB, the Volkswagen Motorsport team once again had put in a strong showing at Rally France on 4-7 October. Sébastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia took another Super 2000 (S2000) class win, while team mates Andreas Mikkelsen and Ola Fløene scored fastest times on six of the rally’s stages. The pair of Škoda Fabias took positions 11 and 12 in the overall finishing classifications.

The Volkswagen drivers fought fiercely close battles on Thursday’s tarmac stages in Strasbourg, where a wet surface made choosing the right tyres tricky. By the end of the seven stages, Ogier and Mikkelsen were just five seconds apart. They continued their close duel on Saturday’s dry stages until the young Norwegian struggled with an engine misfire due to a defective injector, losing more than two minutes to Ogier.

Last year’s winner and Frenchman Ogier assessed the event positively: ‘It was a good home rally for us. This year, we weren’t able to battle for overall victory because it was about gathering as much experience as possible. The conditions were changeable but good to drive on the whole,’ commented the 29 year-old. More than 300,000 spectators lined the roads in Alsace, to watch the Volkswagen Motorsport team gather crucial data for the 2013 season, when the concern will be fielding the newly-developed 300bhp Polo R WRC rally car.

‘I’m very happy with the entire squad. We finished this rally with a strong performance in class and smooth operations in service as planned. The changeable weather was probably anything but inviting for the large crowd of enthusiastic spectators but good practice for us,’ said Volkswagen Motorsport Director Jost Capito. ‘Congratulations to Sébastien Loeb and the Citroën team on winning the World Champion’s title for a record ninth time. We’re very much looking forward to competing against this strong squad next year with the Polo R WRC.’

The exciting penultimate round of the 2012 Engen Volkswagen Cup has left the championship title fight wide open, with all to play for next month. Going into last weekend’s meeting at Killarney, Kelvin van der Linde and Devin Robertson were separated by 35 points, the four-point lead going to Van der Linde by the end of the two-race round. This was despite Van der Linde suffering from a broken sideshaft which left him stranded on the grid of race one just after the warm-up lap, and out of the competition. Jordan Pepper qualified fastest and took pole position, with Kosie Weyers and Shaun La Reserveé fighting for the lead in lap two. Pepper retook the lead, though, leaving Weyers and La Reserveé battling for the second spot, Weyers claiming it when the chequered flag waved the racers home.

Van der Linde was pole-sitter for race two, with Pepper in second followed by Weyers in third. By the end of the first lap, Weyers had moved into the lead, with Pepper in third behind Van der Linde, and Robertson in fourth. Pepper pushed Weyers hard, but failed to make him slip up, and the pair crossed the line just 0.17 seconds apart. Van der Linde had dropped to 25th, when contact between him and Kyle Barnes saw them both slip down the 30-car field, meaning Van der Linde has it all to do at the season finale in late October. After posting the fastest qualifying time, winning race one, finishing second in race two, setting a new lap record (1:26.464) for the Engen Volkswagen Cup at Killarney and claiming first overall for the day, Jordan Pepper was awarded the title of Driver of the Day in the series.

The 2012 Engen Volkswagen Cup series is similar to the other racing Volkswagen Polo Cup single-series championships run in China, Europe and India. Just as in those official Volkswagen series, the South African one-make format highlights new driving talent. In the Engen series, as many as 35 drivers regularly race in technically identical, 2.0-litre 234bhp Volkswagen Polo Vivo racing cars.

RACE RESULTS
Race 1
1 Jordan Pepper (31: PG Glass)
2 Kosie Weyers (2: Engen Xtreme)
3 Shaun la Réservée (14: Alpine Motors/Compendium Insurance)

Race 2
1 Kosie Weyers (2: Engen Xtreme)
2 Jordan Pepper (31: PG Glass)
3 Devin Robertson (1: Big Boss Auto/Sparco)

Overall standings
1 Jordan Pepper (31: PG Glass)
2 Kosie Weyers (2: Engen Xtreme)
3 Shaun la Réservée (14: Alpine Motors/Compendium Insurance)

It’s been a long time coming, but the South African BP Volkswagen rally team finally scored a podium place at the Toyota Cape Dealer Rally on 16 September. Luck was with Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson when they crossed the line at Caledon. The Polo S2000 pairing won stage six two days earlier, but a consistent performance never saw them leave the top five positions, and they focused on productin their best result of the season. ‘The pace was quick and we drove hard, but for us it was more about keeping our podium position than challenging for an overall victory,’ said Kuun.

Kuun and Hodgson’s run wasn’t without drama and incident. A collision with a stray sheep damaged the steering of the Polo, and they had to complete a further two stages before the components could be repaired. ‘We really thought it was all over at that point,’ said Kuun. But, the service crew effected the necessary repairs to the duo’s Polo S2000 rally car, allowing them to get back into the thick of the action, and post fast stage times.

‘This is a good result for our new BP Volkswagen Polo S2000,’ says Mike Rowe, head of Volkswagen Motorsport. ‘Work on this new-generation rally car has been ongoing and our result this weekend shows that the effort is starting to pay dividends.’

Hergen Fekken and Pierre Arries had a tough event, with Fekken fighting off a dose of flu. A damaging incident on stage one saw them lose 20 seconds, but they finished the event in sixth place overall. ‘We had the problem on the first stage, lost time again with a puncture and I was feeling really ill on Friday,’ said Fekken. ‘I felt much better on Saturday and we just made up as much time as we could.’

Team mates Hans Weijs Jnr and Björn Degandt claimed fourth in stage one and third in stages two and three before they experienced mechanical trouble in stage four which sadly eliminated them from the event. They re-entered for Saturday under Super Rally rules and consistently claimed third-place stage times throughout most of the day.

Polo Vivo S2000 pilots Gugu Zulu and Carl Peskin continued their successful season with an S2000 Challenge class victory, cementing their championship lead in the process. The S1600 class was a tough one for Megan Verlaque and Hilton Auffray in their BP Volkswagen Polo Vivo S1600. ‘On stage three I made a mistake which caused some damage so we had to change strategy and concentrate on making the finish line,’ said Verlaque.

Further down the field, Henk Lategan and Barry White finished behind Zulu and Peskin, taking second place in the S2000 Challenge category. The BP Volkswagen rally team will be in action once more at the Polokwane Rally from 5-7 October 2012.

Volkswagen Motorsport added another class victory to its winning tally at the Rally GB on 13-16 September, as Sébastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia took first place in the Super 2000 classification. Continuing the testing programme for next year’s full-on Polo R WRC entry, Ogier’s class win now makes it the ninth in as many rallies. Finishing 12th overall, the French pairing collected much more valuable gravel surface experience for 2013’s WRC programme. Taking top times in 16 of the 19 special stages, Ogier and Ingrassia were already running one minute ahead by the time the cars reached the end of the first leg, which started in Llandudno.

‘On the first day the conditions were sometimes difficult, as the stages were muddy and very slippery. On Saturday, however, it was a different experience because dry tracks on the Rally GB have been in short supply. The fast gravel stages were great fun,’ explained Ogier, for whom this marked his eighth class victory this season. ‘Our goal was to familiarise ourselves with the event and to reach the finish. The fight in our class was decided early, but at the same time we posed no threat to the many stronger WRC cars.’

As tends to be the case, it wasn’t quite such a jubilant finish for Ogier’s and Ingrassia’s teammates Kevin Abbring and Frédéric Miclotte. Finishing 25th overall after sustaining suspension damage in stage nine, the pair hit a huge stone, breaking a wishbone link. The Volkswagen Motorsport team repaired the damage at the Service Park in Cardiff, but Abbring and Miclotte received a 25-minute Rally 2 regulation time penalty, knocking the down the field. Abbring had attained second in class prior to the incident, but still scored to best times on the Sunday’s stages and developed his pace note system.

‘Now the final phase of our preparations begins for next year’s World Rally Championship. On one side we’re working hard on the Polo R WRC, but at the same time we’re preparing the Volkswagen Motorsport team for the new task. Our aim in Wales was to get to know the rally under competition conditions and to gain as much experience as possible. Bringing both Škoda Fabia S2000s to Cardiff was important for the entire team. The ninth class win of the season shows that the crew is already working with a high degree of routine and is competitive,’ explained Volkswagen Motorsport Director Jost Capito.