Dust, speed and heartbreak at Legends rally

My first rally taught me a lesson in patience, and a mantra for fans of the racing format: You don’t watch a rally; you wait for it.

For long stretches there is nothing except the sound of the wind, and a layer of dust that seems to hang permanently in the air. Then someone up the road hears an engine before anyone else does, and cellphone cameras appear everywhere. The sound grows from a distant growl into a full-throated roar, and a rally car flashes past in a cloud of gravel and dust before disappearing towards the next turn.

Then you wait again.

The inaugural GR Legends Rally, held at Soetdoring on the outskirts of Bronkhortspruit, ie in the middle of nowhere, turned out to be an ideal introduction to the sport. It was close enough to inhale every dust cloud thrown up by the cars, yet spread across enough terrain to appreciate the variations in courses.

Following the Toyota Gazoo Racing South Africa crew of Mark Jones and navigator Kes Naidoo added another dimension. From the outside, rallying can appear to be organised chaos. Spend a day with a team and it becomes clear how much depends on preparation.

But that preparation almost unravelled before the rally had even begun.

During Thursday’s shakedown – a short test run before the rally begins – the GR Yaris developed a gear-linkage problem within a few hundred metres. The team, with help from Godrich Toyota, repaired the fault and completed additional checks away from the official route so the car could start the rally on Friday.

From there, Jones and Naidoo worked their way through the opening stages without incident, ending Friday tenth overall and fourth in the NRC2 class, the class for two-wheel-drive rally cars.

“It was a very tough weekend for both man and machine,” said Jones. “The car is still evolving and I’m still learning. We just kept working away at it and focused on getting through every stage.”

The rally itself constantly changed character. One spectator point offered sweeping high-speed sections. Another centred on a tight hairpin where drivers balanced speed against survival.

Saturday brought the reward for patient driving. The Toyota crew climbed to seventh overall and third in NRC2, with only one stage remaining. A class podium looked within reach. Then it didn’t.

On the final stage, after a fast section leading into a hairpin, an over-rev during a downshift triggered the engine’s protection system. The GR Yaris stopped and refused to restart. Nearby farmers tried to help, but the rally ended within sight of the finish.

“It was a bitter pill to swallow because we’d done all the hard work,” said Jones. “We’d worked our way into third in class with one stage to go, and everything on the car had been faultless after the shakedown repairs. One small mistake was enough to end our rally, but that’s part of the challenge of national rallying. We’ll learn from it and come back stronger.”

However, for a first-time rally spectator, the result almost felt secondary.

The lasting memory was the contrast between the long, dusty silences and the few explosive seconds when each car arrived and vanished again, leaving another cloud hanging over the road.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.