Battle on for SA’s young motorsport guns

Pretoria - What happens if you select what you believe to be South Africa's 18 best young racing drivers and invite them to an intensive three-day Motorsport Development Academy at a vehicle testing facility? You wind up with them competing, however unofficially, for bragging rights as Top Gun.

And that, of course is what happened as the 17 guys and one girl - many of them second-generation motorsport competitors - met up on Sunday at the University of Pretoria's High Performance Centre on Sunday for an intensive physical and psychometric analysis, followed by a team-building exercise.

The drivers then headed to Gerotek, north of Pretoria, on Monday and Tuesday for a series of practical exercises on the test facility's notoriously tricky vehicle dynamics courses - and the competition to see who could score highest on each exercise was predictably intense. These were interspersed with classroom sessions focussing, among other subjects on dealing with sponsorship, the importance of media, doping and young drivers' role in promoting safer driving at all levels.

Incredibly competitive

Convenor Steve Harding diplomatically refused to name a Top Gun among the group.

"What we can tell you is that this group comprises eighteen brilliant young South African race drivers," he said. "We knew full well they were all talented racers - that's why they were here - but they were also incredibly competitive.

"The entire group was extremely closely matched across the various fitness, driving and theoretical disciplines," he said. "Different drivers proved better in different disciplines, which resulted in a very close field overall.

"But this is certainly not the end of it - we now challenge them to go out and better themselves, taking what they've learned here and using it to their best advantage to become the future leaders of South African motorsport. "

"We'll be monitoring them all on the facets covered here, and each driver will go through a follow-up physical analysis toward the end of the year.

"After that, we will rate their overall performance and improvement over that period."

Looks like we might have a Top Gun then, after all!

The 18 young drivers selected for the inaugural FIA-sponsored MSA Motorsport Development Academy were, in alphabetical order:

Dayne Angel

Brad Benningfield

Tristan de Nobrega

Willie Erasmus

Julian Familiaris

Delano Fowler

Raoul Hyman

Richard Leeke