Brothers prove endurance champs
THE East London Grand Prix track was a hive of activity over the weekend as the latest round of the Mopar African Endurance Series was fought out on Saturday afternoon.
Some 69 competitors turned out for the enjoyable day of long-distance racing action that saw enthralling battles on the track.
In the end it was the Scribante brothers Franco and Silvio in their Chevron B26-Suzuki who proved their class to take a second win in a row in the series.
“It was a great day of racing. We had really lovely weather. The crowd wasn’t as big as we would have hoped, but I think the Port Festival made us suffer a bit,” said Border Motor Sport spokesman Dave Kirkman.
“It was a very exciting race because in an endurance race over three hours doesn’t necessarily mean that the biggest, fastest and most expensive car will always be victorious, as reliability and consistency of laps is absolutely critical. So in the end we had a Chevron as part of the Scribante crew who won the overall result with the most laps.”
The Scribante’s finished three laps clear of Michael Jensen and Mark Lauth in their Fantastic Racing Renault FR1, who took the runner-up spot, ahead of local Sun Moodley, along with Andrew Culbert in their Bigfoot Express Porsche 991 GT3 Cup, who rounded out the podium.
“Sun Moodley is one of our local guys who is always here, supporting us all the time and he did wonderfully on the day which was great to see,” said Kirkman.
“We also had a local Renault R10 driven by Gary Schultz and Johan van der Westhuizen, which is a car that was built in the early 70s, that was really reliable right to the end and actually came fourth on index of performance.”
It was also an interesting couple of days out for a number of Buffalo City College students who got the opportunity to work in the pits and on the cars alongside the drivers and mechanics.
“We had a group of students from Buffalo City Technical College to come and experience what it’s like to be involved in motor sport engineering and they got to experience it first-hand helping prepare the cars on Friday and were in the action in the pits on Saturday during the race,” said Kirkman.
“We hope that they will take this experience back with them and open a whole new career opportunity for them as well as others.”
In the end it was a successful day out at the track and the fans that turned out to enjoy the action were treated to some exciting racing.
“Overall we had no major incidents. We had a couple of cars break down and get fixed again, which is always exciting to see and it is a wonderful team effort from the pit crews and mechanics over the race,” said Kirkman.