3rd stage of All-Russia rally raids Championship, the “Quiet Don” baja took place in Rostov-on-the-Don from 3 to 5 September.
September 3 saw the prologue of the race on a track in Rostov where the participants raced 2 km in order to determine the order of their appearance at the starting line on the next day.
For the second and third racing days, the participants moved 100 km away from the city to the settlement of Gukovo which a short wile ago had been the place of one of the most spectacular stages of All-Russia classical rally Championship. 54 crews started off in the race. It should be noted that, in addition to the traditional for the Championship vehicle classes: Production, Super Production and National, 4 trucks rated in Category T4 took part in the tournament.
All in all, 8 teams applied: Krasmotorsport, R-Jazz, Geo-Raid, YAROVIT-ROSAGROLEASING, Nart-Time, VMP Racing Team, Business Car-Castrol Racing and Megapolis TNC.
Inside the two racing days, the motorists covered almost 570 km of the most grueling track. According to the racers, the Rostov track was less complicated than the Astrakhan one, however, it was in no way behind the latter in terms of spectacular appeal and intense struggle (the Complexity rating was 1.0).
5 crews raced for YAROVIT-ROSAGROLEASING team in the baja. The race proved to be the luckiest for the team leaders, the crew of Andrei Birukov / Dmitri Kniga. Car breakages stripped the YAROVIT-AGROLEASING team of the possibility to climb the top step of the podium, yet it won the honorary third place in its scoring T1 category, which is the best result of a crew in this season’s Championship of Russia. The crew of Leonid Novitski / Oleg Tupenkin showed a fair result taking 6th place in the most prestigious T2 Category.
In the National Class, the crew of Vladimir Tupenkin / Andrei Rudnitski came out to be the 8th. Technical problems prevented the team from getting a prize place in this category.
Serguei Sukhovenko of R-Jazz team won the race whereas Serguei Girya (Business Car Racing) came out the second.
Materials from http://www.avtosport.ru/ andhttp://www.autotusa.ru/ were used when preparing this article.
