MOTORSPORT: Rallying to the fore

Most motor racing categories have wrapped up for the year, although a new season of Formula E has begun, and rallying remains in the spotlight.

MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi won the Monza Rally Show in Italy at the weekend for a record sixth time, overcoming a late 10-second penalty for his 2016 Ford Fiesta RS WRC being found to be 7kg underweight.

He and co-driver Carlo Cassina beat a Hyundai i20 WRC in which the driving was shared by the Rally Australia winner of two weeks ago, Belgian Thierry Neuville, and his recently-recruited Norwegian teammate – and last year’s Rally Oz winner – Andreas Mikkelsen.

They too incurred a 10-second penalty, for hitting a marker, and also had a left-rear tyre puncture, finishing three seconds behind Rossi but 2.7 seconds ahead of the Citroen DS 3 of early leader, former Audi sports car racer Marco Bonanomi.

Rossi’s victory puts him one ahead of another Italian circuit racing star, Rinaldo Capelli, a three-time winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans – with Bentley in 2003 and then with Audi the next year and again in 2008.

Australia’s oldest rally – the now bi-annual Alpine, for two-wheel drive, non-turbocharged cars almost exclusively from before the turn of the century – went ahead in Victoria’s East Gippsland despite heavy rain that made the course slippery and led to the cancellation of two of Saturday’s stages.

Of the 130 entries accepted for the three-day classic, 127 started and 103 finished.

The winners, in a BMW 320i, were former Toyota factory driver Ben Barker – still wearing his Toyota overalls – and his co-driver, Damien Long.

They finished 1:37.8 seconds ahead of four-time national champion Simon Evans, driving a Datsun Stanza, with the co-driver seat filled by Ben Searcy, who two weeks earlier partnered Nathan Quinn of Coffs Harbour as he clinched the Australian Rally Championship on his home soil at Rally Oz in a Mitsubishi Lancer IX.

Quinn was 10th in the Alpine, driving a Mazda RX2 with David Green as his co-driver this time.

A Ford Escort RS1800, driven by Luke Sylema and Adam Wright, took third place, almost five minutes behind Barker and Searcy, with the exciting Plymouth Fire Arrow of Kade Barrett and David Guest fourth.

Highly-rated New Zealand drivers Deane Buist and Derek Ayson found the Alpine exceptionally tough in their Escorts, although Buist wound up eighth while Ayson was among the non-finishers.

So too were Jack Monkhouse and his co-driver Dale Moscatt in the recently-rebuilt Datsun 180B SSS in which they won the previous Alpine in 2015.

Celebrations of all sorts in Adelaide
Rallying will be a big part of this week’s celebration of motorsport in Adelaide too.

The three-day, 750km Adelaide Rally starting on Thursday has more than 200 cars entered, including some great world and Australian championship machinery and drivers including four-time national champion Neal Bates and Formula 1 star Daniel Ricciardo’s father, Joe, in a Porsche.

The tarmac event folds into the Adelaide Motorsport Festival in Victoria Park on the fringe of the CBD and that has been home, firstly, to the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix for more than a decade from the mid-1980s and more recently the popular 500km Supercars Championship annual season-opener.

F1 and motorcycles also will share in the limelight over the weekend, with several ex-GP cars having Supercar drivers in the cockpit and dual superbike world champion Troy Bayliss aboard a Ducati.

The drawcards also include a Ferrari FXX – one of only 30 built, with a 6.3-litre V12 engine – to driven by Craig Lowndes and a 1200-horsepower Toyota 86 with a twin-turbocharged Nissan engine fresh from the World Time Attack Challenge in Sydney and labelled the WTF86. It will take on an F1 car, the Arrows FA15, in a ‘drag race’ from a rolling start.

Drifting will come to the park too, with ‘Driftsquid’ Jake Jones in a BMW M3 powered by a monstrous Nissan GTR RB28 stroker engine making more than 1000hp.

Garth Tander will demonstrate the Super5000 open-wheeler designed and built in Adelaide and which is the prototype for a new support series to join the Supercars calendar.

Apart from the action in the park over the weekend there will be a parade of cars from the festival and rally through a street party in Adelaide’s restaurant precinct on Friday night.

Nowhere in Australia is motorsport more enjoyed and enjoyable than in the South Australian capital.

Rosberg champions the electric cause
Formula E, the international electric open-wheeler series that began its fourth season in Hong Kong at the weekend, has a new champion – in words at least.

Nico Rosberg, who so surprisingly retired from Formula 1 a year ago within a week of winning the world championship, was in HK, speaking glowingly of Formula E and hinting at an involvement soon, but not as a driver.

Rosberg has a strong engineering bent and would have been employed by the Williams grand prix team on that side had it not hired him as an F1 driver last decade.

Claiming he doesn’t miss race driving – “I’m totally fulfilled” – Rosberg said: “I know quite a lot about Formula E. I have been following it. It has an amazing future, a great future. It is on the right track.

“Formula E has hit the nail on the head: the hype is there for e-mobility and that is why there is a guaranteed great future for this, because people are going to be watching and this is going to be the technology of the future battling.

“It is going to be right here. Never has there been a racing series where the technology is so one-to-one. It goes from the race car into the road car of the future that we are all going to be driving.

“All the best brands in the world are here fighting each other, so it is awesome.”

They’re not all there yet, although BMW, Porsche, Mercedes and Nissan will enter in the next two seasons.

Engineers from Mercedes-linked HWA have been injected into Monaco-based Venturi team, which notched a podium in HK and was unlucky not to win on Sunday, ahead of the three-pointed star brand’s official arrival in 2019-20.

BMW says it is well ahead of schedule in preparation for its full-factory entry next year with its own drivetrain, building on its association with America’s Andretti Autosport in the series.

BMW’s motorsport director Jens Marquardt said it had been working extensively on the use of new silicone carbide materials. In wiring and semi-conductors these are said to resolve the issue of power and efficiency losses that can significantly impede the performance of e-motors.

Meanwhile, the Formula E champion drivers of the past two seasons are off to a bad start this season.

Brazilian Lucas di Grassi, the reigning champion, did not score a point in HK because of a damaged suspension in Saturday’s opening race and a battery issue on Sunday.

Swiss Sebastien Buemi scraped a solitary point on the second day, but only after the disqualification of the first driver across the line, German Daniel Abt.

Scrutineers found post-race that part numbers in Abt’s Audi factory team car and its “technical passport” did not match.

Audi team principal Allan McNish indicated an appeal was likely because “the parts are identical and all fully correspond to homologation”.

Abt’s exclusion after the podium presentation promoted Swede Felix Rosenqvist of the Mahindra team to first place, ahead of Venturi’s Swiss driver Edoardo Mortara, who dominated the race but spun in the closing stages and finished second, ahead of New Zealander Mitch Evans for Jaguar – giving that marque its first trophy of any great significance since 2002 in F1.

Englishman Sam Bird took victory on the opening day for DS Virgin Racing, ahead of Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne for TECHEETAH and German Nick Heidfeld for Mahindra.

Bird leads the driver standings with 35 points, having finished fifth on Sunday after a 10-place grid penalty, while Vergne has 33 points, Rosenqvist 29, Mortara 24 and Heidfeld 15.

Mahindra leads the team standings with 44 points from DS Virgin (41), TECHEETAH (33), Venturi (30), Jaguar (27) and Audi (11).

America’s Dragon, headed by Roger Penske’s son Jay, is the only one of the 10 teams without a point, while previously-dominant Renault e.dams is second last with only seven.

A caustic Buemi said of his Renault outfit that “it would appear the French manufacturer team has lost its edge”.

“I don’t have confidence in the car or the team. We were not quick enough,” Buemi said.

“We need to understand why … and what we need to do before Marrakesh (in Morocco, the venue for the next round on January 13).