RallySport Magazine September 2016

VW Polo Lifan
and Suzuki
Hybrid BYD Qin
U WON’T BE SEEING
It was further down in the supporting classes, and
especially the popular S2 category, that really unfamiliar cars
were found.
Top car at Zhangye was the JAC Refine S2, which finished
first, third and fourth, but the winner was only 15 seconds in
front of a new Chang Yi Moving XT.
Among the curiosities of the category were a couple of rare
small passenger Proton-derived Youngman Lotus L3 cars,
which are no longer being produced.
The smallest class was S1, in which the winner was a Lifan
520, a model already seen in competition last year in the FIA
Codasur championsip events. Rivals were the familiar shapes
of a Changan Suzuki Swift and Volkswagen Polo.
Perhaps the most unusual category is the special class
for hybrid cars, all of them being BYD Qin cars. These
cars require special electrical recharging facilities in
parc ferme situations. Zhangye saw nine of these cars entered,
one of them running in the parallel APRC rally.
Entry levels for CRC events are impressively high, a total of
121 for the recent Zhangye event, in addition to the entries
for the APRC event, with numerically a large proportion being
cars that are seldom seen outside the country.
The calendar for CRC championship rallies is as fluid as the
regulations to which the cars are prepared. This restricts the
opportunities for foreign drivers to compete on these events
and score championship points for the teams for which they
run, but they are not allowed to score drivers’ championship
points.
Normally only three or four foreign drivers will be active on
each CRC event. British driver, David Higgins, said that there
was a 50/50 chance that a published date for a future event
would change at short notice! The locations for qualifying
events are far flung and conditions were varied. The city of
Zhangye is three days driving, each way, from Beijing, with no
convenient airline connections.
The event was held in very high temperatures, a location
which the imaginative Chinese federation proposed to the FIA
as being a suitable venue for the recently abandoned WRC
event.
Winter events have been held at Mohe in the far north of
the country in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, largely run
on frozen lakes. Another event has been run out of Jixi, north
of Vladivostok and not far from the North Korean border,
again as a winter event.
Normally the only time foreign people will see these events
is at the annual APRC event, for many years held at Longyou,
north of Shanghai.
It really seemed that finally the world of the WRC would
have a chance to see these cars compete on a supporting
event this year at Huairou, but that never happened. These
cars are destined to remain secrets from behind the bamboo
curtain for another year.
STORY: MARTIN HOLMES, PHOTOS: BRIAN YOUNG
Li Daiwei S3
FAW VW Jetta
FV7166
Deng Xiaowen
S2 Chang Yi
Moving XT
Chiang
Chi-yang S2 JAC
Refine
SEPTEMBER 2016 - RALLYSPORT MAGAZINE | 73