Single Seaters and Sports Prototypes:
Heading into the lunch break Andre Bezuidenhout made it a clean sweep of fastest times, although he was slightly slower in P4 on 35.425 seconds. Robert Wolk also dropped back, losing half a second compared to his previous run on 37.423 seconds, with Andrew Rackstraw returning to the top three on 40.777 seconds ahead of Rui Campos (1990 Shelby CanAm) with his quickest time so far of 41.274 seconds.
Modified Saloon Cars:
With a comfortable lead of 0.9 sec and a best time so far of 38.981 sec, Reghard Roets elected to sit out of Practice 4. Petter Solberg was the quickest of the tin-top competitors in this session on 40.349 seconds, emulating the slightly slower overall times in the warm mid-day conditions.
Franco Scribante’s P4 run came to an abrupt end shortly after the start when the rear propshaft let go and he had a bit of a scare as the car almost headed into the wall. “We’ve never had a rear prop failure, and although we’ve upped the power a bit, we are nowhere near what we are planning to run,” he said. “We’ve got a spare, but we have to quickly figure out why it happened.”
Charl Joubert landed up second quickest in his 2005 Honda Lotus Elise twin-turbo V6 with his best run yet, less than a tenth slower than Solberg on 40.424 sec. Martin van Zummeren ended third (42.551 sec) in his wild 2002 Nissan R34 GT-R.
Road-going Saloon Cars & Supercars:
JP van der Walt topped the standard production class with his best run of 44.630 sec in P4, coming within 0.068 sec off his winning time from last year. This placed him 1.5 seconds clear of second-placed Garth Mackintosh (46.139 sec) and Clint Weston (46.212 sec).
Gordon Nicholson ended the session in fourth (46.810 sec), ahead of Ashley Oldfield (2023 BMW XM), Robert Gearing (2023 BMW M2), F1 star Mika Salo (2023 Mercedes-AMG A45S) and Thomas Falkiner (2023 BMW i4 M50).
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Release compiled by Colin Mileman (082-897-6145 colin@milemanmedia.co.za)