Murthy, Sujith clinch championship

Chandigarh, Dec 30 (IANS):

Bangalore’s Chidananda Murthy and co-driver B.S. Sujith Kumar of Team Tata Motors Full Throttle sealed the championship in the Pro-Stock category despite finishing second behind team-mates S. Gopalkrishnan and V. Sekar in the fifth round of the FMSCI JK Tyre Indian National TSD Rally Championship here.

Another Full Throttle pair of Girijashankar Joshy and Chandra Mouli finished first in the Overall and Pro-Expert categories Saturday ahead of team-mates Satish Gopalkrishnan and Savera D’Souza, the husband-wife pair from Bangalore.

In fact, the second place finish helped Satish and Savera to move to the top in Overall and Pro-Expert categories as leaders Karthick Maruthi and Sankar Anand of Team Mahindra dropped points after they were docked 10 minutes penalty for approaching a Time Control in the wrong direction.

Murthy and Sujith, who picked up 18 points, finished on 108 as against the 73 of Gopalkrishnan and Sekar with just one more round to be gone through next month.

Satish and Savera took their tally to 78 in the Overall and Pro-Expert categories while Maruthi and Anand have 71 and 77, respectively.

The Full Throttle team of Dipika Poddar and Ipsita Das from Kolkata took the honours in the all-ladies category.

The final classifications:

Overall/Pro-Expert: G.B. Girijashankar Joshy/Chandra Mouli (Tata Motors Full Throttle) 1 (43 secs); Satish Gopalkrishnan/Savera D’Souza (Full Throttle) 2 (00:01:06); Anubhab De/Chandan Sen (Pvt) 3 (00:01:21).

Pro-Stock: S. Gopalkrishnan/V. Sekar (Full Throttle) 1 (00:06:03); Chidananda Murthy/B.S. Sujith Kumar (Full Throttle) 2 (00:13:14); Saurav Chatterjee/Moulinath Ghosh (Pvt) 3 (00:13:20).

All-Ladies: Dipika Poddar/Ipsita Das (Full Throttle) 1 (01:30:23).

Novice: Swaraj Shingi/Ayush 1 (01:05:09); Daljit Singh/Viney Sahi 2 (01:11:55); Shivjeet Malik/Diviraj Thakran (01:18:51).

Couple: Daljit Singh/Viney Sahi 1 (01:11:55); Amarpreet Singh/Nitika Mahajan 2 (01:55:43); Divya Grover/Jiten Grover 3 (02:01:59).