Madcap race for a worthy cause

Cannonball Run Africa is an annual three-day event organised by the Round Table and Super Car Lifestyle.

Inspired by the Burt Reynolds movie of the same name, it gives our country's well-heeled sports car owners a chance to compete against each other in a series of testing challenges.

There is everything from tyre-roasting performance showdowns to ridiculously complicated roadside treasure hunts - like searching for a rusted sign on an old farm gate, or using a special code to decipher the word hidden inside a telephone number painted on the wall of a spaza shop.

Yeah, that's when things really get complicated.

Interspersed with lots of partying and nocturnal shenanigans (like wrapping competitors' cars in shrink wrap), the purpose of this wild event is to raise some much-needed money for the QuadPara Association of South Africa (QASA) - most of which comes from the R13000 entry fee plus a never-ending spate of spot fines dealt out to competitors by the event's merciless band of law enforcement officers - the Chips.

Hiding behind every corner and lurking at every other checkpoint, they are tasked to collect fistfuls of cannonball dollars: a virtual currency that every participant is required to purchase before the start of the event.

By now you can probably deduce that this little automotive foray isn't cheap. And you would be right. That's why it helps to have a large corporate backer like Jaguar South Africa behind you.

Sponsoring the entry fee as well as a few grand's worth of spending money, the Leaping Cat again put me and co-driver Jesse Adams behind the wheel of their latest and greatest sports car. Last year we had the epic Jaguar XKR-S, a sledgehammer of a Gran Turismo that managed to raise many an eyebrow.

Particularly in the various performance challenges where its powerful V8 engine and surprisingly nimble handling allowed us to finish ahead of many cars that, on paper, should definitely have had the upper hand.

In return for their financial investment, we made the Jaguar brand look good and got many high net-worth individuals interested in their product offering.

So this year they tossed us the key fob to their brand new R975 000 F-Type V6 S and, straightaway, we leapt to the top of the leaderboard. Kicking off early on a frigid Thursday morning, we Cannonballers were told to meet at Zwartkops Raceway for our first challenge, which was to set a hot lap around the 2.4km circuit.

Because I got to do this one last year in the Jaguar XKR-S, it was now up to Adams to stand up and deliver the goods. And, man, did he ever.

Immediately diving down the inside of a Porsche Cayman, BMW 650i and Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, the speedy American blew many a mind by he clocking a time of 1:13.00, more than two seconds faster than the second-placed car (the aforementioned Mercedes SLS AMG).

This showed just how well matched that 280kW supercharged V6 engine was to the Jaguar's responsive, short wheelbase chassis. Yep, even I've got to admit that it was a most impressive display.

Unfortunately it all went pear-shaped from there on.

We messed up directions. Got lost in Mamelodi. Nearly ran out of fuel on the R21. Messed up more directions.

Got lost again (this time by over 120km) and took forever crossing the border into Swaziland, our official stomping ground for the next two days of the competition.

In fact, our only other day one highlight came when I finished a respectable second to a more potent Nissan GT-R at the Middelburg Mall Gymkhana.

Fortunately, day two was a whole lot better. For not only did we crack many of the questions etched inside our clue book, we also came sixth overall in the high-speed challenge that was held across a winding section of rural Swaziland road.

This made us the fastest sub-300kW car in the field.

In fact the only machines that were faster than us were the Porsche 911 Turbos, a Mercedes SLS AMG and a pair of Nissan GT-Rs.

We got to indulge in even more bragging on the final day when Adams stormed a hill climb at an absolutely incredible lick.

In a Walter Röhrl-rivalling performance, he managed to steal us third position behind a significantly more powerful Nissan GT-R and Porsche 911 Turbo. Again, this just goes to show how well the F-Type handles on the ragged limit.

So what happened next? Well, we could have cracked a few more riddles and increased our overall standing on the provisional points board. But, instead, we chose to help a husband and wife team who had been sidelined after their Mini Cooper S got hit by a monster puncture.

To cut a long story short, I volunteered to take one of them to the nearest town, some 20km away, to pick up a fresh Bridgestone from a tyre dealer who happened to still be open.

This operation (quite a feat in the already space-strapped F-Type I can assure you) took a good hour and a half, by which time we were well and truly out of the running.

But at least we managed to fare slightly better than we did last year, eventually coming 25th out of 33 competitors.

We also proved that the new Jaguar F-Type is a formidable package. Rapid, wonderful to look at and endowed with one of the rudest exhaust notes I've heard in a long time, it's capable of holding its own among some considerably more powerful and more expensive machinery.

The only chink in its armour seems to be its woeful lack of stowage space - something we only just managed to work around by removing the spare wheel that otherwise takes up the entire boot area.

Still, this bugbear more or less faded into relative insignificance when we learnt that we had, in our own small, corporate-backed way, contributed towards the giant R215000 raised during the course of the event.

That's the great thing about Cannonball Run Africa. It doesn't matter whether you finish first or last - everybody goes home feeling like a winner.

QASA was established in 1978 as a non-profit organisation that strives to prevent spinal cord injury through high-profile information campaigns. It also protects and promotes the interests of people with mobility impairments through lobbying and advocacy.