1987 BMW Western Province Rally
Stellenbosch – 28 November 1987
by Johan Swart
The date – 28 November 1987. The start and finish – picturesque Stellenbosch Airfield. The battlefield – the Boland with its cornfields, the West coast with its sand dunes and the Stellenhosch area with all its winelands.
Everything was fine (including the weather) for this last air rally of 1987. With the prospects of Springbok Team selection for the 1988 World Air Rally Championships in mind, every competitor, especially the top ten, were very tense. This was really the last chance to gain those extra points to make sure nobody is overlooked by the selectors.
The rally was run under the new world rules, but we also wanted to encourage the beginners to take part and enjoy this event. For this reason we decided to run a two-in-one rally – a Sportsman Class for the not-so-experienced team and an Open Class for the more serious competitors. The course was exactly the same, the difference being that the Sportsman Class had the whole route drawn in on their maps and they received a detailed flight log.
The Open Class had to find and identify secret ground markers and calculate 3 missing checkpoints, while they only had a limited flight log. The workload for the latter class was very high. In total there were ten checkpoints, three secret checkpoints, start and finish, 15 photographs, ten ground markers and three timed turns.
At the prizegiving party the 1987 SA Air Rally Champions were also announced. For the second year running, this honour goes to Ivanhoe and Dave Perelson from Eastern Province.
Our thanks go to Roy Waldek (EP) who acted chief judge, and Kassie Kasselman (OFS),Les Sephton (EP) and Mike Hartley (Natal) who were the jury for this event.
With 18 entries for Sportsman and 17 for the Open Class, we feel that this experiment was a roaring success and we hope that the other provinces will also try this two-in-one rally system. Organizing such an event is a bit of a headache if one does not have a foolproof computer program – one that will give one class all the information and the other class only bits and pieces and then separate all the final results into the two classes. This was achieved by using a program written by Dave Perelson form Eastern Province. Dave has put a lot of hard work into this program and it is now available to the other provinces. If you need more information contact Dave Perelson.
Needless to say, the BMW WP AIR RALLY was enjoyed by all. Some of the competitors even managed to have their first flight in the BMW hot air balloon. The organisers wish to express their sincere gratitude to BMW(SA) and especially to Chris Roodt(BMW – Head Office) and Rob Kingsley (BMW – Cape, Town Office) who gave us their full support to make the rally possible.
The results were as follows:
OPEN CLASS
- 1. I Perelson/D Perelson – JCY – 839
- 2. A Schoeman/J Swart – JYU – 892
- 3 A Channing/P Norton – CIR – 1110
- 4. A Pilling/R Crosskill – IHW – 1193
- 5. M Spence/B Gibson – KSF – 1293
- 6. J Adarns/C Jordaan – KSV – 1323
SPORTSMAN CLASS
- 1. P Peter-Bowyer/A Carnegie – 1712
- 2. D Linton/M Brown – LMJ – 3591
- 3. L Nell/P Van der Merwe – IOH – 3885
- 4. S Berson/A Bane – OMR – 4164
- 5. B Bosch/D De Goede – EKE – 4369
- 6. A Verwey/A Verwey – LPP – 4401