By GIFT NDOLWANE
JOHANNESBURG – SOUTH Africa’s premier circuit racing category is heading to Cape Town for its second season this week promising faster speeds than achieved at the inaugural edition last year.
A grid of at least 16 cars will line up for Round 1 of the Sasol Global Touring Car (GTC) Championship at the Killarney International Raceway on Friday and Saturday.
“We are pushing hard to produce spectacular racing this year, with lots of effort put into debugging the cars and ensuring they are faster than where we started from at round one last year,” says GTC director Gary Formato.
“We will have a consistent field of 16 cars on the grid, I can confirm one privateer is building a GTC car, and there will be a new Honda in GTC2 early in the season.”
Gennaro Bonafede, racing the BMW GTC racecar is among the favourites to win this season after coming second overall behind  Michael Stephen who drove Engen Audi A3 GTC .
With an expanded calendar of nine rounds scheduled between March and November, the Sasol GTC Championship will bring high-octane racing action to thousands of spectators around the country as it travels to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Pretoria and Johannesburg.
The event was recently launched in Johannesburg with Sasol – a company that has been the country’s premier motorsport sponsor for over 50 years – continuing as naming rights sponsor, fuel supplier and broadcast sponsor of the 2017 season.
Speaking at the Sasol GTC Championship season launch, Christopher Kabosha, Senior Manager: Marketing and Public Affairs at Sasol Energy, said he was happy to continue the partnership with GTC and looked forward to raising the bar again in 2017.
– Guardian