Guna
on his way to second overall
22/11/2008
22 November,
2008, Sepang: Leg One of the sixth and final round of the
Malaysian Rally Championship (MRC) in Ladang KLIA Sepang
proved to be as challenging as everyone expected it to be
after the initial recce of the stages yesterday.
The extremely rough surface of the
four routes that made up the first day claimed 11 cars by
the end of SS7 including Lim Leong Onn from the Perodua
M5 Racing Team.
With Lim out of the race early, Gunaseelan
Rajoo’s chance to be Overall runner up for the 2008
season looks promising. He just has to keep it together
until the end of day two to finish the rally.
The Perodua M5 Racing Team started
the weekend with the rather modest goal of winning their
respective categories but even that seemed too difficult
as their two top drivers were out of contention after SS3.
Kan Chee Hong and co-driver Bernard
Chin flipped their Perodua Myvi 4WD within the first three
kilometres of the start gate of SS1 while Lim Leong Onn
put his Viva 4WD in a ditch in SS3.
The damage to the Myvi was so severe
that team manager Garry Chua decided to pull it out of competition
while Lim’s Viva will be repaired for Sunday.
Perodua’s third driver, Jamaluddin
Tukimin and sister Rozita Tukimin managed to complete the
day with the order to stay safe and preserve the car.
“I am going on a Sunday drive
today,” Jamaluddin said in jest.
This year’s champion, Karamjit
Singh of the GSR Pennzoil Racing Team made it through unscathed
by playing it safe, something he felt was absolutely necessary
if he were to see the end of the day in once piece.
Interviewed
after the first pass of the four SS, he said that the road
conditions made it impossible for them to go all out.
“We
were scraping the chin spoiler so many times today and we
were not even going fast. The road is so rough that it happened
even when we were going slow in second gear,” Karamjit
said.
With the
two veteran Team Perodua drivers out of the way, Rozali
Abdullah from Team R&T Motorsport had a easy time maintaining
his third place spot.
The difficult rallying conditions
put all the survivors into a very cautious mood and this
was reflected by their uniformly close finishing times.
Karamjit completed three passes of
the four SS to cross the end of SS12 with a total time of
49 minutes 10 seconds while Gunaseelan was 2:10 behind,
followed by Rozali who finished the day with 1:08 more on
the clock.
Fourth place P. Nandakumar clocked
56:28 to complete day 1, Siraj Abdullah tailed behind with
a time of 56:37, sixth place driver Mike Arokiasamy completed
the 12 stages in 58:16.
Nandakumar, also with Team Pennzoil
said that within the four special stages that made up the
first day’s competition, there were only two places
where he could really give his car a run.
“The stages are very rough and
the undercarriage is constantly being pounded so I had to
be careful not to break anything.” he said.
The female duo of Gina Finanza Daud
and Nur Rashidah Rahim did not even start the first SS as
their car suffered a broken windscreen on the way to the
morning service park. They will start on Sunday.
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