What South African Rally Raid Championship Round 1 Report
Where Malelane, Mpumalanga
When 19-20 April 2024
Community South Africa National
Every Red-Lined car entered finishes gruesome Nkomazi 400
The 2024 South African Rally Raid championship season opening Nkomazi 400 is generally regarded as the toughest and most technical race on the calendar, and this year was no different with retirement claiming 40% of the cars entered. The Red-Lined Motorsport team race cars however stood up to the challenge recording a 100% finishing rate. That included a lock out of the top five in the T1 Adventure class, as well as both new Red-Lined REVO+ GT-Rs finishing first time out without any mechanical issues.
“Wow, what a way to start off the year for Red-Lined Motorsport,” team principal Terence Marsh commented, before delving into his usual statistics: “Only 60% of the cars that started this tough and technical Nkomazi 400 actually went on to finish the gruelling race,” he added. “Also interesting to note is that 33% of the total entries for this event were Red-Lined built race cars, which went on to record an overall finishing rate of 89% which in turn represented 45% of the total finishers!
“On top of that, we had three Red-Lined built cars in the overall top ten of the T1+ Ultimate class, both of our brand new REVO+ GT-Rs finished on debut despite one of them only turning a wheel in anger quite literally a day before the event.” And then looking at the T1 Adventurer results in a little more detail, there were three different Red-Lined cars on the podium, namely Daniel Schroeder and Ryan Bland winning it in their WCT Engineering run VK50, followed home by Johan De Bruyn and Adriaan Roets in their Falken Tyres Revo and then Gerhard Heinlein and Rudi Heinlein in their VK56. Rounding out the top five were Jurgen Schroeder and Stuart Gregory in their PS Laser VK50 and Philip Botha and Roelof Janse van Vuren in their Penta Motor Group VK56.
“Chris and Albertus had a good GT-R debut finishing 6th overall taking into account there is still so much for us to learn about this race car,” Terence Marsh explains. “They had some traffic and road position challenges throughout the event but mechanically the car proved to be good which was our major objective over the weekend. And then Dave Klaassen and Tessa Rooth’s quite literally out of the box GT-R went on to finish 12th overall with no technical issues. Now we need to regroup as a technical team and focus on the development of our GT-R with a third car expected to join us for the next round. T1+ debutant, 19-year-old Pim Klaassen together with Rikus Hattingh, had a great first outing in the Ultimate class taking ninth overall and recording a top 10 finish first time out in their Daklapack Rallysport REVO+ V8.”
“All in all, Nkomazi was an incredible start to our 2024 South African Rally Raid championship season,” Terence Marsh concluded. “All I can do once again is make a massive shout out to all the race crews as well as every member of our respective technical teams. Well done one and all, you have once again done us proud!”
*Red-Lined Motorsport competes with premium strategic partners, the Penta Motor Group, BFGoodrich, Motul, Dragon Energy, PentaSure, OMP, and ExpandaSign.
Issued on behalf of Red-Lined Motorsport
Photography by: Andre Laubscher
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