KCB Kisumu Rally revisits Songhor, Chemelil and Miwani

Karan Patel and Taussef Khan in a Subaru GC8 in a past rally. [PHOTO:FILE/STANDARD]

The hills around Chemase, Chemelil, Songhor, Miwani and Kobonyo No.4 will reverberate with the roar of turbo-charged engines when the penultimate KCB Kisumu Rally revs-off this Saturday.

The rally co-sponsored by iWay Africa, ICEA Lion and ALS, will be flagged-off outside KCB branch in Kisumu and finish at Chemase’s Kibos Sugar weigh-bridge.

The flag-off, which marks the seventh round of the KCB Kenya National Rally Championship (KNRC), is scheduled for 7am while the finish 3.30pm.

The action on sugarcane-fields bordering Nandi and Kibos regions, is expected to reach a crescendo at the prize giving ceremony planned for 5pm.

“Prize giving is planned to take place on the spectator stage, a deliberate move organisers have preferred to enable area residents view cars at ceremonial finish,” clerk of the course Surinder Thatthi told FeverPitch.

Last year’s spectator was run at Nucleus which was quite a distance from the service at Chemase.
This year’s spectator stage isn’t on it sown, said Thatthi. It is part of the 29km section (4); towards the end.

The spectator stage is situated behind the service area at Chemase where Equator Motor Club (EMC) has graded a track that will accommodate viewing of rally cars at full action.

The spectator part on the 29km section 4 is an eight kilometre stretch.
Competitive mileage for this rally is 150km and an approximately 90kms that make up the event’s transport road section.

The EMC round of KNRC will feature seven stages of which three will be repeated and one extra stage that’s being run as the first stage of the day. The shortest stage is 13kms (CS1) and the longest 29kms.
With recent torrential rains pounding the lakeside region, some sections of the route are a little rough.

But organisers EMC are trying to put some murram in the big mud-holes so that they are not that rough on the day of the race.

The rally starts at KCB branch, after which cars will do Stage One, which is a short one, a 13km stretch running from Miwani through to Kabonyo No. 4.

And then crews come out and head into first service at the weighbridge. From there, they will go out of service and do Nucleus Farm stage then proceed to Chemelil-Songhor (27km).

The other stage starts near Songhor through the service park and is 29km long. The three stages will be repeated again after regroup.

Kisumu has been wet over the past few weeks.

So if it rains on Saturday, it will be a muddy rally and the crews will have a tough time.
Only Nucleus will run on private farm land while the rest of the stages will be on public roads according to EMC chairman Manjeet Sembi.