Jan Habig Rallying

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Lucky escape for Habig & Paisley

14 September 2013

The Toyota Dealer Rally started with a bang on Friday morning in Cape Town for Jan Habig & Robert Paisley (Basil Read Ford Fiesta).

The very first special stage saw the demise of a few of the top S2000 class contenders. Habig & Paisley went into the stage and at full throttle made a bad pace note call, and were lucky to live to tell the story.

"We were going through a sequence of five or six "left 6" and "left 5s" and suddenly the "left 6" was actually a "right 9"," said Habig. "We had absolutely nowhere to go and at that speed we managed to "fly" our Basil Read Fiesta across a ditch, through a farm fence, with an eventual safe landing. Our problem then was that we couldn't get back across the ditch onto the rally route and had to drive about a kilometre up the road before we found our way back onto the route.

"Unfortunately the car had sustained considerable damage to the radiator, and we had to search for water before we could get back to the Service Park," he added.

To make things worse, Habig and Paisley also had a herd of cows to contend with - overall a very dangerous situation but, as Habig said: "Not quite as scary as our launch across the ditch! We were very, very lucky.

The team repaired the car as best they could and the crew re-entered the event under Super Rally regulations on Saturday.

A video clip of this first special stage run on Friday 13 September, the view from the cockpit of the Basil Read Fiesta, can be watched here:

Video courtesy of Hein Etzel.

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