Venu Holds the Line: Venunath V Wins INRC 3 at Coimbatore

The top line of the Rally of Coimbatore belonged to Dean Mascarenhas and Gagan Karumbaiah. One of the weekend’s most complete class drives came from car 21, where Venunath V and Sanath G guided the Chettinad Sporting Volkswagen Polo to the INRC 3 victory in 01:40:36.798.

Around the service park, Venunath is known as Venu. On the timing sheet, the name is Venunath V. The distinction matters only because the drive itself needed no explanation. The crew finished thirteenth overall, won its class by 44.935 seconds and kept the Polo inside the classification through a rally that repeatedly asked the same questions at higher speed.

FAB Rally School’s result post describes Venunath as a student who came through its training programme before taking the national-stage win. That gives the Coimbatore result a clear shape: the class victory sits alongside the work done in training, recce and competition preparation.

The timing line that settled INRC 3

The completed official classification records Venu and Sanath at 01:40:36.798. Jenu Johnson and Lenin Joseph were second in INRC 3 at 01:41:21.733, leaving the winning crew with a margin of 44.935 seconds. Abishek Gowda T C and Mahesh Nandi completed the class podium at 01:41:27.404.

The final service export available to ViPeople gives the aggregate for each classified crew. It does not publish a separate split time for Venunath on every stage in the export, so this report keeps the timing exact and follows the crew through the full recorded stage sequence without inventing intermediate numbers.

Eight recorded runs, one sustained answer

The completed timing picture records eight stage runs across the Coimbatore weekend. The public event brief names Black Thunder and S.M. Agro as the repeated tests, with the roads returning four times apiece. That format rewards the crew who learns quickly, protects the car and keeps the same quality of decision-making when the surface has been changed by every car ahead.

That is the shape of a class win at a repeated gravel rally. The first pass gives the crew information. The next pass asks whether the information has become pace. By the final loop, every call has to survive the wear in the tyres, the movement in the road and the knowledge that one mistake can erase a weekend’s work.

A Polo that stayed inside the rally

The car in the supplied photograph carries the visual language of the Chettinad Sporting programme, with the number 21, the Polo body and the Venunath V / Sanath G crew panel clearly visible. It is a fitting image for this result because the class win came through continuity. The car kept returning. The crew kept making the next call. The final total kept improving its position against the wider field.

The class had multiple story

Jenu Johnson and Lenin Joseph finished second, with Abishek Gowda T C and Mahesh Nandi third. Tarushi Vikram and Athreya Kousgi placed fourth in the class while adding the Women’s and Junior battles to a seventeenth-place overall result. Chandan Manche Gowda and Suraj Keshava Prasad completed fifth, keeping the leading group close enough for the class to remain a real contest through the final controls.

Arvind Dheerendra’s roll changed the earlier shape of the class, and the wider INRC 3 field carried gearbox trouble, restarts and the fatigue of a fast weekend. Venu’s clean finish therefore has weight beyond the class label. It shows what happens when a crew leaves enough margin to keep the car moving while still extracting the time the road is offering.

The next step is consistency

A first INRC 3 win gives Venu and Sanath a reference for the rest of the season. The next rally will change the road, the rhythm and the service questions. The useful part of this result is the evidence it carries: the crew can learn a repeated gravel test, keep the Polo reliable and finish with enough pace to win the class and reach the upper half of the overall order.