Cane ploughing in KZN rally

Photo: Rajesh Jantilal

The UK’s Ashley Haigh-Smith and Craig Parry
in the crowd-pleasing Super Special Stage of
the Total Rally, held in Durban last night.

IN a rally full of drama and sportmanship yesterday, champion drivers Mark Cronje and Robin Houghton stopped to help Johnny Gemmel and Carolyn Swan, who had done some alarming cane harvesting using their Castrol Toyota Auris.

This just after Enzo Kuun and Guy Hodgson had rolled in their Sasol Polo in the third stage of the Total Rally, which started in Scottburgh and ended in Durban.

They crashed out of the event on stage three in spectacular fashion within site of the finish. The crew was dazed and the car is a write-off. Kuun was lying third at the time.

Morne Janse van Rensburg and Rickus Foure also “went surgarcane farming” in their Polo on the second corner of the stage, according to a tweet by Fourie.

The crashes show just how hard the other teams are racing to try and unseat Cronje and Houghton this year.

Luckily, none of the drivers who made unplanned safaris in the canefields were injured. The various crashes however saw stages 4 and 6 cancelled and of the thirty crews who departed to Durban yesterday, six did not start this morning.

Finishing a surprising third place yesterday was matriculant Henk Lategan. At 18, Lategan is the youngest driver yet in SA rallying. He is racing in Sasol VW car number 17 with veteran navigator Barry White.

In car nr 314, S20, privateers from Pietermaritzburg, Thane Archer and Frans de Wit, aim to have a blast with the big guns from out of town.

Yesterday’s racing culminated with a crowd-pleasing Super Special Stage, held on tar at the old Drive-Inn.

Today’s timed rally is 171 km long, returning to Scottburgh.

The 24 crews whose cars survived yesterday will contend not only with other racers under the influence of red mist, but KZN’s famously slippery and unpredictable dirt roads over 14 gravel stages back to Scottburgh.

The action ends by mid-afternoon today. More details on the stages and spectator maps at www.totalmotorsport.co.za.

Sucking the public purse dry via fuel taxes

This 18-month old Cambodian boy taught himself how to
suckle from a cow after the calf had done drinking.
Governments the world over do the same with petrol price,
except the State would try cramming all the teats into one mouth.

Having predicted that South Africa's fuel price will hover over R12/liter for the most part of 2013 in this blog, the latest budget speech by Finance minister Pravin Gordhan has taken the first step towards making this prediction a pillaging reality.

As he did in 2012, the Road Accident Fund (REF) and Fuel levies increased again, this time by 23 cents per litre.
This year it is 0,08c a litre for the RAF and 0,15c a litre for the fuel levies. (In 2012, it was also 8c for the RAF but 20c for the levies.)
South Africans  buy some 970 million litres of petrol and 980 million litres of diesel over an average month like September.
This means the latest  ZAR77,600,000 million the latest 8 cent increase will add from next month just in petrol.
Mr Gordhan sternly said he hopes our government will spend wisely the taxes our Receicer so efficiently gather.
Nobody laughed, and he did not make any other jokes during his speech.
Currently, the fuel price is South Africa is comrpised in the following manner:

Fuel price	%
Basic fuel price and state levy	53.1
Customs, Duties, RAF, Basic Tax	27.9
Wholesale	7
Retail	8.4
Transport	2.4
Delivery	1.2

Above looks like government takes only a quarter of the money, which looks good compared to the UK or France, but "delivery" equates to a state-owned parastatal, while all other sectors pay add valorum tax on every drop we burn in our ICE engines.
Which means our government is still stretching the petrol teat like a kettie, and pillaging the public's purse with a least R8 billion a month in the process.
Which every economist tells us, will drive up inflation.
Electric engines, anyone?

One night in Bangkok makes hard bikes jingle

Designs included a military issue leaning trike, a fatboy,
the latest in designer-biker hotpants
and  all the bling you can fit.

The Bangkok Motorbike Festival. (BMF) is quite unlike any other motorcycle show on Earth. Held within one of the world’s largest shopping centers, the festival parks bikes and scooters among upmarket boutiques and cafes. Thailanders — most all but born on scooters — throng the displays.

Apart from the international brands like Honda, the show also displayed bikes from brands totally unknown in South Africa, like Can-Am Spyder, Victory, SYM, Stallions and Zero Engineering.

For this year's BMF, Honda Thailand challenged the country’s customisers to design something different for the Bangkok Motorbike Festival. 

One in three unnatural deaths in SA is involves a vehicle

A study by the medical Research Council Council in 2013 shows driving to be the second biggest cause of deaths in South Africa. The study is based on 57 274 post mortems conducted in 45 mortuaries across South Africa.
A worrying trend to under-report the statistics has also emerged, with the mortuaries having  17 103 bodies of people who had died in crashes  during 2009, compared to the 13 768 road deaths according the police.
The study also showed that driving was potentially just 2,5% percentage points less dangerous than being murdered.
By the Murder is still the nr 1 cause of death in South Africa, with just over three in ten people (36,3%) dying thus. By comparison, road accidents causing 33,8%. Road accidents are however the single biggest cause of unnatural deaths among women at 42,6%.