NAIROBI, Kenya- The fourth day of the Kenya Airways East African Safari Classic Rally took in four stages of which the shortest was a two-kilometre sprint round a cement quarry.
This section was included to give spectators from the Nairobi area a chance to see the rally cars in action with the stages shaking up the leader board in no uncertain fashion.
On the first section, the fastest man was Richard Göransson in a Team Tidö Porsche 911 but after his earlier problems, he is classified in the mid-20s and can only hope to make up a small part of his two and half hour deficit to the leaders.
More interesting for the overall classification was that Gregoire de Mevius, driving a BMA Porsche 911, was second fastest.
With slower times recorded by Ian Duncan – the overnight leader in his Ford Capri V8 – and Stig Blomqvist in his Team Tidö Porsche 911, De Mevius thus took the lead.
Blomqvist was in on-going trouble with his brakes which, despite several attempts by the Tuthill mechanics to tighten wheel bearings and play with the brake pedal box, was still suffering from ’knock-off’ that could leave the driver without brakes at the end of a straight.
In one such place, they slid off and he had to use the jack to get stones under the rear wheels to get down off the bank.
For Duncan, the problem was the usual one of collecting a puncture and stopping to change it.
In the same section, Viking Motorsport lost its best-classified Ford Escort when Aziz Tejpar came to a halt with a broken strut that ripped out the rest of the front suspension.
And the Porsche of Josef Jobst/Jürgen Bertl limped out on four cyinders after their Porsche had broken a valve in the engine that promptly went on to break two rocker arms.
There was work too for the medical helicopter when Franz Wünderlich hit a drift hard enough with his Porsche 911 to damage his spine.
He drove slowly out of the stage and was then spirited away to hospital in Nairobi with co-driver, Klaus-Peter Kristek.
However, De Mevius’s lead was not to last long since some 73km into the next competitive section the Belgian ace went off the road and could not regain the track thanks to a broken driveshaft.
Fastest man here was Geoff Bell in the Amigos team Datsun 260Z who by virtue of that moved ahead of his team leader Steve Perez, also Datsun 260Z mounted, With good times also for the Porsches of Blomqvist and Gérard Marcy, Blomqvist regained the lead of this fascinating rally with a margin of nearly two minutes over Duncan who had sustained no fewer than three punctures in this section.
The more worrying news for the Kenyan driver was that Marcy was now only 11 seconds behind in third with Bell some two and a half minutes further back in fourth.
Better news for local drivers was that David and Alex Horsey had moved up in their Tuthill Porsche 911 to sixth behind Perez while Onkar Rai/Baldev Chager were now eighth.
Apart from Alastair Cavenagh suffering the minor indignity of breaking a throttle cable on his Viking Ford Escort Mk2 and having to complete the section peering past co-driver, Carl Tundo who was sitting under the open bonnet operating the carburettors by hand, the spectator stage had no effect on the general classification.
On the stage itself, the fastest man was Duncan who managed to take nine seconds away from Blomqvist’s lead and eight from Marcy just behind him.
Chager was the fastest in the last section with the new national rally champion quite happy with that performance, despite losing third gear.
However many others, including the leaders, came out of that section complaining about the fact that there were errors in the road book caused by recent road works that had not been highlighted or corrected by the three-day car.
The situation at the end of the day is that provisionally Blomqvist led Duncan by 50 seconds with Marcy just over eight minutes behind in third.
