Amittrajit Ghosh wins Rally Maharashtra

With the rains pouring down and the clouds covering the hills, the ‘stage’ was indeed set for an intriguing Rally Maharashta in Nashik. And Amittrajit Ghosh along with his co-driver Ashwin Naik drove brilliantly to take the overall victory in the second round of FMSCI Indian National Rally Championship, which was organised during June 6th to 9th. Driving the Mitsubishi Cedia, Amittrajit completed all the 10 stages of the rally in a record time of 1:28.16, which was nearly half a minute faster than second placed Vikram Mathias. 

Driving the No. 6 Mitsubishi Cedia, Mathias and his co-driver Shrikanth tried hard but couldn’t quite outpace rally winner Ghosh and were at all stages a few seconds behind except for SS10 where Mathias was 5 seconds faster than Ghosh. Arjun Rao and Satish Rajagopal, who were constantly faster than Mathais driving the Volkswagen Polo, couldn’t keep the momentum going in the latter half of the rally and had to settle for a third place finish just a little over 2 seconds shy of the Cedia driver. 

Image Courtesy: VW Motorsport

Although Rao missed out on a second place finish overall, he proved to be fastest in the INRC 1600 category. Raghu Nandan B and Suraj K took second place in the Honda City VTEC ahead of the No. 15 VW Polo of Byram Godrej and Prajwal Pai . 

The SUV NRC category has only been introduced this year and taking top honours in this segment was rally ace Gaurav Gill driving the Mahindra XUV5OO. Lohitt Urs and Bonnie Thomas took second place but were considerably behind the No. 2 XUV of Gill. Urs took 2:01.12 to complete all the 10 stages as opposed to veteran Gill who crossed the finish line in 1:26.29. 

The INRC 2000 category was thoroughly dominated by the Mitsubishi Cedia with Ghosh and Mathias taking the top two spots on the podium respectively and Rahul Kantharaj and Vivek Y Bhatt securing the last spot on the podium. 

Asad Khan and Zayne Asrar drove a Maruti Esteem to victory in the JINRC category clocking an overall time of 1:36.12. Second placed Aniruddha Rangnekar and Nitin Jacob crossed the finish line in their VW Polo just three seconds after Khan. Rohan Pawar couldn’t quite match up with the pace of the front two and took a third place finish in Nashik. The next round of the Indian National Rally Championship will commence on July 19 and will take drivers to Coimbatore to fight it out on gravel for the top spot.