Supercars star in Cannonball Run
T’S MORE than just an excuse for some of South Africa’s welloff car enthusiasts to run rampant in their supercars. The Cannonball Run Africa is fuelled by charity, and if it hadn’t happened last week ten disabled people would not have received the electric wheelchairs they couldn’t afford on their own.
This year’s edition included 33 entrants paired up into teams of two, which set off on an unknown route for three days in their respective supercars. The convoy of precious metal, including a shiny new F-Type sponsored by Jaguar SA and piloted by yours truly along with Sunday Times motoring writer Thomas Falkiner, was instructed to meet at Zwartkops Raceway near Pretoria early last Thursday morning. But until that timed track session (which the F-Type easily won with a lap of 2minutes 13.1secs) was over we had no idea where we were headed from there.
The Cannonball Run works on a series of daily clue books that work like a scavenger hunt and plot the course for the three-day journey. Thing is, if you are led astray (and this is quite easy, just ask Team
IJaguar) it’s possible to lose the herd of exotica and succumb to all sorts of time and points penalties. Falkiner and I fared very well at intermittent stopwatch-based performance sections, but we were absolutely awful at scoring with clues between checkpoints. The event crossed into Swaziland where it ended on Saturday night. Routes involved a fair share of livestock avoidance, but the Swazi roads added a distinctly African flavour to the event. Extra points were issued to teams who returned to base with live chickens, a man’s scissored-off dreadlock and even a person named Bongani with ID for proof. Our two seater prevented this, but we still managed to score points with the return of a (warm) mielie. Yes, we kept it in the engine compartment for a few hours. Organisers have developed their own Cannonball Dollar, which works on a one-to-one exchange rate to the Rand, but competitors were lucky to have change left over after all the late fees and “bribery” enforced by the event’s own CHIPs (Cannonball Highway Idiots on Patrol) police who would stop cars and extract cash at will. It wasn’t uncommon to see a Merc SLS driver forking out for “speeding”, and 911 Turbos paying for making CHIPs stand in the cold.
In the end Team Jaguar had finished a lowly 25th, but we had also come first, second, third and sixth on the Run’s timed events. The FType, even in middle V6S specification, is a formidable performance roadster that last week put many a Nissan GT-R, Porsche, AMG and BMW to shame. Falkiner even managed to outpace Jaki Scheckter in a Maserati MC Stradale on one time attack stage. He was very proud of himself ...
Congratulations to Jan-Hendrik Delport and Tanja Engelbrecht for winning this year’s event in their Mercedes SL55 AMG. The Cannonball, organised by the Round Table, raised almost R215 000 for the QuadPara Association of South Africa.