Three way battle on cards in Round 2 of National Rally Championship
Current leader of the INRC overall category Gaurav Gill will be the driver to watch out for as he will hope to continue his stupendous run and aim for an encore
Itanagar: A battle royale between the top Indian drivers is on the anvil as the Rally of Arunachal, Round 2 of the Champions Yacht Club FMSCI Indian National Rally Championship 2020, set to begin here late on Saturday evening.
Current leader of the INRC overall category Gaurav Gill will be the driver to watch out for as he will hope to continue his stupendous run and aim for an encore. The JK Tyre driver along with his trusted co-driver Musa Sherif was on a roll in the opening round and dominated the proceedings winning on a canter.
With the rally to run on more or less similar terrains from last round, it will add to his advantage and he will start the rounds with odds in his favour.
However, he will be wary of MRF driver Karna Kadur, who is sitting behind him on the table. Karna and his co-driver Nikhil V Pai also showed exemplary driving skills and will hope to improve on his performance and catch up his nemesis to end the round on a high.
While Gaurav and Karna both had fabulous outing in the opening round, a lot of their dominance was also due to the defending champion Chetan Shivram of Team Yokohama dropping out after the first stage itself. Chetan Shivram (& Rupesh Kholay) finds himself in similar territory as last year where he had a DNF in the opening round and then came out guns blazing to clinch the title. He will take a lot of heart from that incident and sure will look to get his title defence back on track and score as many as points from this round to keep him afloat in the championship picture.
“We are really pumped up for this round. After the DNF in the last round, we were not quite sure if we would be able to start this round but the tuners did an excellent job and worked overnight to get the car in place,” Chetan said. “Even though the car does not match the specs as to what we came in here with, we are optimistic and will go all out. We never give up and we are looking forward to post some real good timings,” he further added.
Chetan Shivram will also have an eye on his INRC 2 category which is currently being led by Dean Mascarenhas (& Shruptha Padival). Dean is also on the third position on the overall standings.
In the INRC 3 category, Lokesh Gowda alongwith Sudhindra BG of Team Yokohama will be a firm favourite and after missing out on the first round due to DNF, he will filled with renewed vigor.
Also, it will be interesting to see how the all-women’s team of Pragathi Gowda and Deeksha Balakrishnan performs. The Team Vasundhara duo performed exceptionally well and left everyone awe-struck with their performance. They will head into the round high on optimism.
In the INRC 4 category, it will be a fight between round 1 winner Lanusanen Pongener (& Lokaranjan HJ), defending champion Vaibhav Marathe (& Suhan M.K )and Rohit Iyer (& M. Manjunath).
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