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South African rally driver Max Smart won Africa’s place in the FIA Rally Star Programme, where he raced for three years, and went on to the Junior World Rally Championship. Now competing in Spain, he leads the Spanish Gravel Rally Championship for PCR Sport by a single point going into the final round in Granada. In an interview with BizNews, Smart talks about winning a stage on ice in Sweden having never seen snow, and how he has come up with a way to finance the R600,000 a rally cost of competing, which includes his 20 Club sponsorship programme and learning the skills of a mechanic in his team’s workshop. And where did it all start? With a video game, and a momager who helps him keep it going. As a young driver going it alone, he is still building the partnerships that will keep his Ford Fiesta Rally2, “an absolute monster” of a car, on the road. - Linda van Tilburg

Wicknell Chivayo handed out Rolls-Royces, posed with piles of cash and bought a R160 million home in Clifton. Then, days after Open Secrets asked the Hawks to investigate how R800 million from a Zimbabwean election contract landed in his South African accounts, his helicopter came down outside Harare. Michael Marchant, head of investigations at Open Secrets, traced how a man with a fraud conviction and a decade of damaging headlines moved money through South African banks, estate agents and luxury car dealers, and why the presidents who praised him at his funeral may have their own reasons to keep the myth alive. He argued this was never only Zimbabwe's problem: with his estate now up for grabs and a fresh FATF review looming, the Chivayo case had become a test of whether South Africa can stop being a parking lot for the continent's dirty money.

William Saunderson-Meyer tells Alec Hogg that MK will outlast Jacob Zuma: dead or alive, Zuma has shaped South African politics, and any ANC recovery has to run through a party he expects to grow and to take control of Durban's council. Patriotic Alliance co-founder Charles Cilliers hits back after the DA's Tertuis Simmers called the PA a criminal enterprise, accusing him of insulting poor voters. Open Secrets' Michael Marchant traces how the late Wicknell Chivayo's inflated R1 billion Zimbabwean election contract pushed R800 million into South African accounts. Plus the latest from Wall Street.

Is Jacob Zuma the glue holding MK together, or has the party already outgrown him? In the first of his weekly conversations with Alec Hogg on BizNews, William Saunderson-Meyer, whose Jaundiced Eye column has run every week since 1993, said he didn't buy the common wisdom. He argued that MK had tapped a deep well of grievance against the ANC, that it stood to grow in the local elections, and that the ANC's road back to power may run through MK. He sized up Duduzane Zuma as heir apparent, compared the family's split to Romulus and Remus, and described Gayton McKenzie as a hyena of the political wilderness. Then he laid out one set of numbers he keeps coming back to, and why it should worry anyone counting on a weaker ANC.

Earlier in the week, the DA's Tertuis Simmers sat in the same BizNews studio and called the Patriotic Alliance a criminal enterprise dressed up as a party. Charles Cilliers, the PA co-founder and former newspaper editor who wrote Gayton McKenzie's life story, came back with his reply. He told Alec Hogg what he made of the vote-buying claims in George, why he believes the DA cannot lead a coalition, and his version of the Joburg deal that collapsed over a single mayoral committee post. He took on the Beaufort West fundraising questions and the "coloured nationalist" label, and explained why the PA would still hold its nose and work with a party it finds nauseating. He would not say what the PA's first demand will be if it holds the balance of power after 4 November.