Gaurav Gill

Calcutta: Team MRF’s Gaurav Gill and co-driver Musa Sherif clocked the best time in the Spectator Special Stage to win the Rally de Kolkata, the third round of the Speed-Indian National Rally Championship, sponsored by Bharat Petroleum, at the Santoshpur Stadium Sunday.

Gill, driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Cedia, was two seconds quicker than arch-rival city driver Amittrajit Ghosh over two laps of the 1.2 km long circuit to bag the overall honour along with the 2000cc N+ category. Amittrajit, was driving with co-driver Ashwin Naik.

The 28-year old Gill was the quickest on all the three days to pick up 16 points to mark his presence in the National Championship stakes after two non-finishes in the previous rounds in Coimbatore and Bangalore. Unless the pending protests change the point positions, Amittrajit will trail Gill by a narrow margin in the INRC with three rounds to go.

Round III results

Overall: 1. Gaurav Gill/Musa Sherif (Team MRF, Cedia N+) (53mins, 26secs); 2. Amittrajit Ghosh/Ashwin Naik (Red Rooster Racing, Cedia N+) (54:45); 3. Sujay Suresh/Varun Satyanarayana (Maruti Baleno, 57:18).

1600cc (Maruti Baleno): 1. Sujay/Varun; 2. Rahul Kanthraj/Vivek Bhatt; 3. Ranjith Gopinath/Dilieep Ramanujam

1400cc (MPFI Esteem): 1. Francis K Jose/Manoj Mohan (DDL Sports) (1:02:14); 2. Saurabh Choudhury/Shivaprakash E (1:03:01); 3. Asgar Ali SK/Debashish Ghosh (1:08:03).

Rally Star Cup (Carbureted Esteem): 1. Karna Kadur/Somonita Ghosh (1:00:37); 2. Phalguna Urs/Anoop Kumar (1:01:07); 3. Venkatapathy MR/Santosh K Selvaraj (1:02:36).

Gypsy Cup: 1. Khushwant Randhawa/Vinay Sekhar (1:03:51); 2. Anil Wadia/Prajwal Pai (Team Thunderbolt) (1:05:27); 3. Bobby Jose/Bobby Varghese (DDL Sports) (1:07:01).