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Day 7 – Saturday – Taita to
Arusha
While competitors are slogging it
out on Wales Rally GB, VK Vodka Kick rally driver Steve Perez continued on the
seventh day of the Kenya Airways East African Safari Rally, gaining another
place in the process.
Along with co driver Mike Stuart,
the Chesterfield man in his Datsun 260Z is up to sixth place overall after over
200km of stages today which took the crew out of Kenya and into Tanzania.
The pair were up to fifth place
in the morning after the mammoth 150km stage, but after hitting a rock which
broke an engine mount and in turn bent the steering rack on the day’s second
stage which itself was over 60km long, Perez emerged with a grimace on his face
and commented:
“That was hard work and I now
have muscles like Charles Atlas! Or should that be Paul Bird?” He continued:
“We’ve done just about as many stage miles today as the crews do in three days
on Rally GB and now we only have the distance of around another one and a half
World Championship rallies to do yet! The roads in
Tanzania are
fast and mountainous so I’m looking forward to them.”
Now that the problems with the
rear suspension has been sorted on the car, the VK Rally Team’s efforts are
concentrating on the support truck which has been giving problems for a couple
of days.
Tomorrow, the rally comprises a
loop circumnavigating Mount
Meru from the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge
outside Arusha that again provides just two competitive sections totalling over
200km again. After that, there is just one long day on Monday back to the finish
in Mombasa with three competitive
sections one of which is in the infamous
Usambara
Mountains.
Leaderboard after Day
7
1 Bjorn Waldegard/Mathias
Waldegard, Ford Escort Mk1, 11h 30m 19s
2 Frederic Dor/Didier Breton,
Porsche 911, 11h 46m 24s
3 Gerard Marcy/Alain Lopes,
Porsche 911, 11h 47m 34s
4 Geoff
Fielding/Preston Ayres, Porsche 911, 12h 31m 45s
5 Paul-Eric Jarry/Craig
Redelinghuys, Porsche 911, 12h 44m 19s
6 Steve
Perez/Michael Stuart, Datsun 260Z, 12h 45m 20s
7 John Lloyd/Adrian Cavenagh,
Datsun 240Z, 13h 00m 46s
8 Stig Blomqvist/Ana Goni,
Ford Escort Mk1, 13h 08m 57s
9 Roddy Sachs/Peter Young,
Datsun 180B, 13h 17m 14s
10
Wayne Kieswetter/Rob Hellier,
Datsun 180B, 13h 42m 39s
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