The Hindu : Sport / Racing : Motor : Creditable show by Naren; Loeb wins

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Sport - Racing : Motor

Creditable show by Naren; Loeb wins

KOCHI: India’s V.R. Naren Kumar saved his best for the last as he finished a creditable 11th in the Acropolis Rally of Greece in Athens on Sunday. Sebastien Loeb, driving a Citroen, won the World Rally Championship title. He has now won five of this season’s seven rallies.

Naren, who was making his debut in the WRC, missed a top ten finish by just about three minutes in the Production cars’ event and finished an impressive 24th overall.

After floating between the 12th and 15th positions in four of the final day’s six Special Stages, the 34-year-old from Coimbatore who was driving a Subaru Impreza Sti N14 proved his class by finishing fourth in the rally’s last stage at Tatoi, a 4.60-km stretch of smooth gravel.

Quite happy

“We were quite happy with the drive, considering that this is my first event in the World championship,” said the Team Sidvin India driver who is sponsored by the Bangalore-based Sidvin Core-Tech.

“We pushed where the stages were smooth and held back where the stages were rough.”

“The event is extremely rough as you could see the number of cars that did not finish,” said Naren, a former six-time Indian champion, who nursed the car to the end despite an oil leak from the engine. “We had a plan and that was to finish the race. Everything went as per plan.”

The mix of rough, twisty mountain stages with many rocks, blistering heat and choking dust makes the Acropolis Rally, the toughest on the WRC calendar.

And with only 16 cars, out of the 28 which started, finishing in the Production class, the rally lived up to its billing of being a car breaker.

Overall, out of the 60 which took off, only 43 finished the three-day event which had a total of 330 kms of Special Stages.

Only five of the 11 Subaru cars that began the rally in the Production class finished the event with Naren, and his British co-driver Nicky Beech, being the second best.

Aigner triumphs

The Acropolis Rally was the second event of the Production Cars World Championship and Austrian Andreas Aigner (Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 9), the winner of the last event in Argentina, won the title in Greece with Naren a little more than 16 minutes behind the champion.

Mitsubishi Lancers had a high success rate in the event taking nine of the top ten Production class positions.

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