|
 | Northern Forest: Holowczyc and Gadasin fighting for Russian Baja-Win.
|
Today (February 27th) was the first "acting day" of the Baja Russia Northern Forest 2010, the second round of FIA International Cup for Bajas, Russian Championship and Latvian Championship. Before a start of any competition, a list of favourites is always discussed. However, fortune often gives us surprises and this day turned out unfavourable to favourites...
In this rally, the expected contenders to the titles were: Boris Gadasin in FIA International Cup, Artem Varentsov in production class, and Benjamin Dzhepayev and Yuri Borovikov in the national classification. At last, they did not meet pre-start expectation: All three of them suffered some technical troubles.
In Gadasin’s car G-Force Proto (a rebuilt Nissan Navara) the brake disk split apart, the wheel get stucked and the crew has nothing to do but stop for emergency repair. This allowed Polish driver Krzystof Holowczyc (Overdrive Nissan Navara) to keep a leading position throughout the day.
The course of events in production class was similar. On SS2, the World Cup and FIA Cup winner, Artem Varentsov, finished just on the seventh position: Problems with suspension... By contrast, Alexay Yaskov who toed the Northern Forest starting line just for the second time had a strong lead. The only ones who caused troubles to the crew Yaskov/Chapaev were the competitors who had started before them: "We had to overcome too frequently and we even hit one UAZ a little."
In the national classification, the struggle for the win was to develop between the two legends of Russian cross-country: Binjamin Dzhepayev and Yuri Borovikov. Yet already on SS2 Dzhepayev had come to a finish line with an open hood: the engine of his UAZ began to overheat. On the eve of three special stages of tomorrow, Yuri Borovikov keeps the dominance, having a lead of four minutes to the next competitor, Bogdan Vavrenyuk.
Of 41 crews which were on the Start List of the Leg 1 of Baja Russia Northern Forest 2010, only 38 managed to get through 175 km of the Saturday’s special stages. Tomorrow the drivers are to face another 260 rally kilometers under the snowfall promised by weather forecast.
2010/02/27 | 22:05 CET | Editor: MR/HS/NF
|
|
