Sport - Racing : Motor   

Naren faces mechanical problems

By Sanjay Rajan

OBIHIRO (Japan) Sept. 7. V.R. Naren Kumar's maiden year in the Asia Pacific Rally Championship has been an obstacle race of a very different kind. While the bespectacled Coimbatorean has climbed over and crawled under barriers and squeezed through narrow

spaces with felicity in the challenging terrains of Canberra, Rotorua and now in the Rally of Hokkaido, the second leg of which was run through the forests and hills, here, on Saturday, he has lost out more through mechanical failures.

Naren was done in by a gearbox failure for the second rally in succession. This time it was a damaged selector fork in his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo7 which occurred late last evening. Naren (co-driver D. Ram) of Team MRF Tyres, after a rather successful opening leg on Friday, overshot the prescribed 15 minutes between time controls and subsequently his overall times were disallowed. In short, Naren is out of the reckoning for the event.

Nevertheless, he continues to run for bonus leg points, as he did today. However, Team MRF Tyres' other entrant in the Group N category, Australian Stuart Warren (co-driver Darryl

Judd), also in an Mitsubishi Evo7, had a good outing which saw the duo, second among APRC drivers overnight, gain the lead from Italian Nico Caldarola in what was a combination of sensible driving aided by some wretched luck that Caldarola encountered.

The Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul once wrote, "the world is what it is: men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

The top five placings after leg 2: Overall classification: 1. Possum Bourne (Mark Stacey), A8, Subaru Impreza, 2:08:45.4, 2. Taguchi Katsuhiko (Derek Ringer), A8, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo7, 2:08:53.9, 3. Marcos Ligato (Ruben Garcia), N4, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo6, 2:13:04.0, 4. Fumio Nutahara (Hayashi Satoshi), N4, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo7, 2:14:01.0, 5. Hiroshi Yanagisawa (Misaizu Tadashi), A8, Subaru Impreza, 2:14:57.7.

Overall APRC placings: 1. Possum Bourne, 2. Stuart Warren (Darryl Judd), N4, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo7, 2:18:10.6, 3. Karamjit Singh (Allen Oh), A8, Proton Pert, 2:18:22.2, 4. Jean-Louis Leyraud (Rob Scott), N4, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo6, 2:20:37.4, 5. Nico Caldarola (Giovanni Agnese), N4, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo7, 2:22:09.9 .

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