Full Throttle zoom away with all titles in final leg

The driver-navigator pair of Chidanand Murthy and Sujith Kumar BS led team Tata Motors Full Throttle sweep as the Bangalore duo won the Overall and Pro-Stock titles in the sixth and concluding round of the FMSCI-JK Tyre Indian National TSD Rally Championship here on Saturday.

On a day of drama that witnessed eight exclusions for missing Time Controls, Murthy and Sujith negotiated the pitfalls to notch their fourth win of the series while Full Throttle achieved a 1-2-3 sweep of the championship titles in all the three categories.

While Murthy and Sujith had already claimed the championship in the Pro-Stock category after the fifth round, their team-mates and husband-wife tandem from Bangalore, Satish Gopalkrishnan and Savera D’Souza, clinched the crown in both Overall and Pro-Expert categories.

It was not quite the finish that Gopalkrishnan and Savera were hoping for as the pair was among the eight excluded from the results. Also on the exclusion list was another Full Throttle combination of Karthick Maruthi and Sankar Anand from Erode who eventually finished second in the championship in both Overall and Pro-Expert categories.

Results (final): Overall: Chidanand Murthy/ Sujith Kumar BS (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (3:31) 1; MD Ganesh Moorthy/ T Nagarajan (Pvt) (3:46) 2; Saurav Chatterjee/ Moulinath Ghosh (Pvt) (5:44) 3. Pro-Expert: Nirmalya Das/ Shaktivel (Pvt) (13:39) 1; Anubhab Deb/ Chandan Sen (Pvt) (34:58) 2; GB Girijashankar Joshy/ Chandramouli M (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (38:44) 3. Pro-Stock: Chidanand Murthy/ Sujith Kumar BS (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (3:31) 1; MD Ganesh Moorthy/ T Nagarajan (Pvt) (3:46) 2; Saurav Chatterjee/ Moulinath Ghosh (Pvt) (5:44) 3.

Final Championship standings (top 3): Overall: Satish Gopalkrishnan/ Savera D’Souza (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (78 points) 1; Karthick Maruthi/ Sankar Anand (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (71) 2; Sachin Singh/ Chandrasekar M (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (57) 3. Pro-Expert: Satish Gopalkrishnan/ Savera D’Souza (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (78) 1; Karthick Maruthi/ Sankar Anand (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (77) 2; GB Girijashankar Joshy (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (68) 3. Pro-Stock: Chidanand Murthy/ Sujith Kumar BS (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (133) 1; Shanmugam Gopalkrishnan/ Venkatesh Sekar (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (81) 2; Srikanth Gowda/ Kuriakose Elias Paarel (Tata Motors Full Throttle) (52) 3.