Win gifted to Abhilash

Gill fails to finish as Ghosh wins INRC

AA NEW PROMOTER, a new title sponsor and a longer season calendar – all promising signs for Indian rallying which has been struggling for the last seven years. Kolkata-based RRPM have secured the rights to the championship for 2016 and with MRF Racing onboard as title sponsor, the rallying community has received a bit of financial boost.

With the season opener in Coimbatore, there would be two concurrent championships, the IRC and the INRC, run in 2016 with each rally having an overall winner.

The APRC championship leader, Gaurav Gill, was one of the favourites to win the rally as he has been known to challenge the mighty Lancer Evos in his SuperXUV. But at the end of the very first transport stage, Gill was forced to retire as he had suffered a front suspension knuckle failure.

With Gill out of the picture, it was Sammy Thapar (co-driver Gurinder S Mann) who blitzed the course in his Evo X by setting the fastest time at the end of the six stages on Sunday. But he was found to have missed a time control, therefore was penalised and handed over the victory to another veteran driver PG Abhilash (co-driver Shrikanth Gowda), driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII run by Chettinad Sporting.

Gill’s team Mahindra Adventure teammate Amittrajit Ghosh (co-driver Ashwin Naik) went on to take top honours in the INRC segment with the SuperXUV. Their other teammate Sunny Sidhu (co-driver Srinivas Murthy P V) finished 45 seconds behind Ghosh in second. Both their cars had issues with Sunny’s car running the majority of the rally with a clutch problem.

Third placed Dean Mascarenhas (co-driver S N Shanmugha) was the surprise element as he finished just 1 minute and 8 seconds behind the leader in his VW Polo, and was running second overall for most of the rally.

The result also meant Dean won in the new INRC 2000 class where the 1600cc Polos and 2000cc Cedias are clubbed to run in the same class. This was his first win in the Polo after three years. Second in the INRC 2000 class was Bopaiah K M (co-driver Karumbaiah G) followed by Team Yokohama’s Karna Kadur (co-driver Nikhil Pai), all three driving VW Polos.

In the FMSCI Cup, K J Jacob (codriver Manoj Mohanan) won the class from Tarun Reddy (co-driver Lalith Kishore) and Veeresh Prasad (co-driver Suraj M). All three drove the more powerful Honda City VTEC instead of the Maruti Esteem or the Baleno.

With the next rally comprising only of tarmac stages, the Nashik rally will see quick times being set. Although it’s the end of the monsoons, organisers WISA hope that the rains won’t play spoilsport and disturb the schedule.