Zandri Strydom is an SA champ
Pottie Potgieter won the Mpumalanga Enduro #4, which doubled as the SA National Enduro Championships and Enduro World Series Qualifier on Saturday.
The event was held on a course that started and finished at Friends Café in Mbombela.
The enduro was organised by the Trail Awareness Crew and Trailworx ensured that the course was of national championships standard.
Potgieter, from the Western Cape, clocked 14:14 to beat KwaZulu-Natal’s Keira Duncan by 22 seconds.
The races took the format of six timed legs on the course.
Local rider Willie van Eck was third in 14:50.
Duncan held a one-second lead over Potgieter after the first leg.
Potgieter raced to a six-second gap over Duncan on the second leg and never relinquished the lead.
He recorded the fastest time on legs three, four, five and six.
In the women’s race, the Lowveld’s Zandri Strydom was in a class of her own.
She clocked the fastest times on all the legs, except the third in which she had the seventh quickest time.
Her total time for the six legs was 17:40.
The second woman was Lilian Barber, from Limpopo, who also won the junior female category. Her total time was 18:13.
First youth female and third woman overall was Mpumalanga’s Danika Botha in 19:02.
Over 150 riders competed on the day. Most were out-of-towners and Friends Café did a roaring trade throughout the day, as did Kingfisher’s Country Kitchen & Traditional Smokehouse, with the Montana Garden Pavilion precinct packed with enduro racers and their friends and families.
The event also was a huge cash injection for Mbombela, with an estimated 300 weekend tourists in the city for the event.