Broken Drive Shaft Ends Ermelo Rally for Jones and Naidoo
BROKEN DRIVE SHAFT ENDS ERMELO RALLY FOR JONES AND NAIDOO
TOYOTA GAZOO Racing South Africa (TGRSA) suffered a late retirement, with motoring journalist Mark Jones and navigator Kes Naidoo forced out of the Ermelo Rally when a broken left-front driveshaft brought their Toyota GR Yaris to a halt on Stage 11 of Round 5 of the 2026 South African National Rally Championship.
Held on gravel around Ermelo in Mpumalanga on 21 and 22 August, the 16-stage event unfolded in the mild, dry conditions forecast beforehand. The rally was won outright by van Wyk and Swartz, with Lynton Swatton and Tommy Coetzee taking the NRC2 class despite a two-minute, 30-second penalty.
For Jones and Naidoo, Friday’s seven stages passed without incident, the GR Yaris running cleanly and without damage as the crew steadily found their rhythm. They ended the day 11th overall and fourth in the NRC2 class.
“We went in with a positive mindset – the car was good, and we’d put the horror of the GR Legends Rally behind us,” said Jones. “We were a bit tentative at first, but we kept improving stage by stage through Friday. We kept it clean, no damage to the car – it ran like a charm. We finished the night exactly where we expected to be.”
Saturday began the same way, with two more strong stages extending the crew’s clean run before trouble struck on Stage 11. Exiting a fast left-hander hard – a corner the crew know as “the fast eight” – through a section already chewed up by the cars ahead on the road, the GR Yaris let out a clunk from the left-front corner, triggering the same protective engine cut-out that had ended the team’s GR Legends Rally. This time, a restart at first appeared to solve the problem.
“We heard a bit of a clunk, straightened up, and the warning systems came on and cut the power, just like last time,”
Jones explained.
“We thought maybe it was a small error, so we killed the power, restarted, and everything seemed fine. But then we immediately realised the car was pulling hard right – we’d broken the left-front shaft.”
With the GR Yaris’s all-wheel-drive system unable to compensate, the crew’s rally ended within seconds. The electronics rerouted power away from the damaged front corner to the rear, but the rear differential could not sustain the load and overheated, cutting power there too. A final attempt to drive through the remaining right-front wheel alone was blocked by the car’s systems, which will not permit a single wheel to carry the GR Yaris’s full 200kW – leaving the car to coast to a stop around a kilometre short of the stage finish.
“You go from slower, slower, slowest, and eventually it’s like having it in neutral,”
said Jones.
“We couldn’t limp it home. A shaft snaps, it snaps – there’s nothing you can do about it on stage, and we don’t carry a spare because they’re heavy and need to be strapped down properly.”
The car was recovered to service, where mechanics fitted a replacement shaft and had the GR Yaris running perfectly again within around ten minutes – underlining that the failure was an isolated mechanical issue rather than a deeper problem with the car.
“It’s a disappointing end, obviously, and we take no points, but we’re not here for points – this is about vital development,”
Jones said.
“It’s proved to us that the standard shafts are good, but under the extremes of hardcore rallying they’re maybe just not up to it. We’ll harden the driveshafts to give them extra strength and move forward. It’s a development year – the car is going great, these niggles will creep in, but we keep progressing.”
The non-finish means Jones and Naidoo add nothing to the 61 points that had them third in the NRC2 championship heading into the weekend, with the gap to the top of the class now set to grow. On the road, the crew had been fifth in NRC2 after Stage 10, four minutes and 27 seconds off pace-setter Davids, before the driveshaft failure struck on the very next stage.
“The next one’s Algoa – it’s two rounds over two days,”
Jones added.
“We’ll be there, and we’ll give it our all.”
TGRSA’s GR Yaris development programme continues at pace, with hardened driveshafts set to feature among the changes as Jones and Naidoo look to convert Ermelo’s promise into a finish at the Algoa Rally, where Friday and Saturday will each count as a standalone round of the 2026 championship.
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