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OSCAR PIASTRI starred in the Australian Grand Prix before playing the team game and giving up a home race podium to a teammate claiming to be much faster, but in reality, wasn’t. The level headed Aussie has is eye on the big picture and obliged when the team call came to let Lando Norris past while he trailed Charles Leclerc on Lap 29 by two seconds.
Despite Norris’s claims of being much faster, he also was not able to make inroads on Leclerc and finished the race in third, with Piastri following home in fourth, the equal best result for an Australian on home soil since the Australian Grand Prix became a Formula One race in 1985.
“For me, it was completely fair,” Piastri said after the race. “He qualified in front of me yesterday, went a bit longer on the first stop and he was catching me quicker at that point of the race.
“I was keeping with Leclerc and Lando was catching both of us. I was honestly hoping he’d pass me and go and get Charles, for me that was completely fair. Of course, at home, I would have loved to have been able to stay in third.
“For me, it’s been a strong weekend. (There were) a couple of mistakes when it mattered, which is a bit frustrating, but today’s been a solid result. A little bit of an ‘off’ in the middle of the end of the second stint and I grained the tyres a little bit there as well. Just struggled a bit in that part of the race, but apart from that, it was a pretty strong day.”
McLaren surprised everyone with its performance in Melbourne, and concepts that its DRS was not as efficient as others proved to be largely inaccurate. The strategy calls were good too, and left the enormous Australian crowd cheering for a possible podium after the early demise of Max Verstappen.
Piastri went a little hard for the undercut and sacrificed the tyres for the long stint in the middle of the race – running long in Turn 13 was little more than just an embarrassment.
“I Just locked up a bit. The tyres were still okay but maybe pushed 10 and 12 a bit more. I was a bit out of position and the tyres were a bit hotter, and it really doesn’t take much to get it wrong. It didn’t change my result. Of course it was a bit clumsy, but in the grand
scheme of things, it’s just a slap on the wrist to myself.
“Once I put that last set of tyres on, they held on a bit better. I grained the tyres in that middle stint and I just couldn’t really get them back. Some things to learn and go through and see what I could have done a bit better; but definitely, a step in the right direction, but still not the full way there.
“I don’t think I got ahead of myself. Of course, I knew it was a possibility at one point, and if I was quick enough in the middle, then it could have been a reality. With the different strategies we had and the tyre difference in terms of the stop lap, I was expecting Lando to be quicker at that point and he was. I would have loved to have been one spot higher, but for the team, it’s been an amazing weekend.”
He said he was happy with the closing gap to Ferrari and quipped that Verstappen’s failure just meant one less race he’ll win this year, while he was surprised at the lack of pace shown by Perez.
He said he was only aware of the crowd reaction to his performance on the cool-down lap, and that he was humbled all weekend by
the fans in his home town, even getting away with wearing a custom built Richmond jumper to clear sponsorship conflicts.
Papaya was easily the dominant colour in crowd.
“I saw a lot of fans cheering on the cooldown lap, which was very special. Yeah, a little bit disappointed I couldn’t get on the podium for them, but all in all, it’s still been a great weekend.
“At this point last year, not that many people knew who I was and, obviously, I was very new to F1. We weren’t particularly quick as a team ... that’s an understatement. Now, we’ve turned things around. I’ve sort of established myself a bit more. It’s been nice to be more at the pointy end.”
Piastri is fifth in the World Drivers’ Championship with 28 points, trailing Championship leader Max Verstappen by 23 points heading to Japan thjis weekend..
Andrew Clarke
WHILE THE internal politics at Red Bull are leading to suggestions of Max Verstappen’s departure, the one driver definitely on the move for 2025 – currently without a contract for next year – is Carlos Sainz. And there’s no shortage of teams on the phone to the Australian Grand Prix winner.
The latest to join the Carlos Club appears to be Red Bull, with team boss Christian Horner – while needing to be seen to support current Verstappen team-mate Perez – wouldn’t rule out a discussion with the Spaniard:
“Based on a performance like that, you couldn’t rule any possibility out,” he said.
“Carlos is the only driver that’s beaten Red Bull since the end of 2022, so he appears to be our nemesis!
”We want to field the best pairing
that we can at Red Bull Racing and sometimes you’ve got to look outside the pool as well. You’ve had a very fast unemployed driver win today’s race, so the market is reasonably fluid with certain drivers.” (See F1 News pages for more).
Also now part of the Red Bull equation is the need to have a driver in the second Red Bull who could potentially take over the lead role should Verstappen actually depart the team following the recent internal ructions.
Sainz is of course a former Red Bull driver, having made his debut with the Toro Rosso team in 2015, partnering … Max Verstappen, before the Dutchman was promoted to the main Red Bull team part-way through 2016.
Sainz remained with Toro Rosso, with
Daniil Kvyat as team-mate, through to the end of 2017, before moving to Renault for two years, then McLaren for two years, then finally Ferrari from 2021, where he has clearly matured as a driver.
As the only driver to have beaten Red Bull to the top step on the podium for a long time, Sainz appears to ‘fit the bill’ in terms of Red Bull’s needs for 2025 onwards.
But there are clearly other options for the Spaniard – in particular involving the up-coming Audi entry into F1. It has been considered for a while that Sainz would be the optimum recruit to head up the new team – owned by an organisation with significant ties to his father Carlos Snr – but the question is whether he could afford a couple of possible ‘mid-grid’ seasons as the new
organisation and design team found its feet.
And then, of course, there’s the question of Mercedes, and its need to fill the seat left by the departing Lewis Hamilton. Will young Andrea Kimi Antonelli be ready for 2025, or is there a need for a more experienced ‘fill-in’?
And then there’s Aston Martin.
Alonso is out of contract and, with Honda headed that way for 2026 onwards, all of a sudden there’s speculation linking Verstappen – or Sainz – with that option …
It’s quite a merry-go-round, involving Sainz, Alonso, and possibly Verstappen … and with Antonelli and Liam Lawson standing by.
It could all be quite simple and mainly status quo – or ir could be quite dramatic …
SOME FORM of peace appears to have broken out on the Supercars RACE Board following significant disagreements a couple of weeks back.
As AA reported last issue, differences in forward policy and planning had emerged between two key RACE Board members – chairman Barclay Nettlefold and Mark Skaife – with a board meeting called to push for a solution.
Little news has subsequently emerged from the meeting, although AA understands that the meeting had to be adjourned as Skaife was forced to leave, feeling unwell – he was a late starter at the Grand Prix as a result.
Since then, with the Grand Prix weekend as a focus, there has been no news emerging, other than a suggestion that the pair were quietly asked to work on solving their differences …
IN THE
Percat arrived at the plucky family-run team from Queensland battered and bruised following a tough two-year return at Walkinshaw Andretti United.
Despite the South Australian veteran considering walking away from Supercars altogether, he has a new lease of life, culminating in a special underdog win in the Melbourne SuperSprint finale where the #10 held off the Triple Eight heavyweights.
After being 20th last year, Percat now sits a strong fourth in the championship.
MSR team principal Matt Stone revealed it took just one meeting to ignite the fire back into Percat, with the driver thriving among the family of racers.
“We had a meeting with Nick and it was less about creating a program to work together and more about Nick seeing what we are doing and us seeing what he is about and deciding whether we wanted to do something,” Stone told Auto Action after the team’s second win.
“I think Nick walked into our workshop and got really excited by the way we go racing and we were excited by his passion for motorsport.
“He even said to me after that meeting he realised he was not done yet and the way we go racing is how he likes to.
“That is why it has been such a quick run to results because the culture fit is good
and the way he has done racing at past teams like BJR is similar to our way.
“We are a small family team with no politics internally. The buck stops with me and there is no hiding behind the layers of management.
“We are here to go racing and that comes first.”
The connection between Percat and MSR was clear at their first event together in Bathurst where the #10 collected two top 10 finishes before keeping that streak alive across the first three races of the Melbourne SuperSprint despite starting the Saturday race down in 18th.
But then Percat took his form to new heights – Stone admitted the fast start has even caught him by surprise, with his defensive work to keep Will Brown and Broc Feeney behind on wearing tyres at the death particularly impressive.
“Both Nick and I knew we had a lot of
potential together and thought it might take a bit of time to get everything working but I am just thrilled to kick it out of the park so early in the season,” Stone said.
“To get Nick back in the spotlight and show everyone that he is not done and more than capable were the things we wanted to do.
“We have been really impressed with how he positions the car on track. He can be out there fighting for the lead with the guys who have won every race this year and show them he is just as capable.
“We are absolutely thrilled with the results we are getting with Nick. Five top 10s and a race win in round 2 was more than what we were after.”
Last year MSR took a maiden win in its 172nd race but only scored three other top fives for the remainder of the year.
In 2024 Percat has constantly been near the front whilst teammate Cam Hill also
showed great speed at Bathurst.
Stone revealed greater understanding of Gen3 machinery and the off-season aero tweak has made MSR a stronger force.
“Going into year two with these cars we have a lot more information and understanding so we can focus on finding smaller gains,” he said.
“Also the new aero package actually helped solve some of the issues we had last year and we have adapted to that very quickly.
“We are still a bit erratic in qualifying so need to focus as a team on one lap pace because if we qualify up the front we can definitely race up the front.”
Up until Race 6, Triple Eight had been unbeaten in 2024 and few would have picked MSR to end its reign.
However, Stone said it shows his squad “means business” with his eyes firmly locked on reclaiming third in the teams championship from Penrite Racing.
“For the team to be a second-time race winner shows we mean business,” he said.
“Fourth in the teams and drivers championships and if Cam (Hill) didn’t get taken out in the last race we would have maintained third in the teams’.
“Obviously the DNF is a tough pill to swallow but that gives us motivation to go to Taupo and get Cam up the front and get our spot back in pit lane.”
Read more about Percat’s rise to Albert Park success in AA’s chat with the driver himself, on pages 28 and 29.
Thomas Miles
NICK PERCAT IS BACK ON THE WINNERS’ LIST, AND IN THE AFTERGLOW OF THE WIN, HE LAUNCHED AT HIS FORMER EMPLOYER. ANDREW CLARKE DEBRIEFED WITH HIM …
AFTER THE toughest year of his motor racing career, Nick Percat has bounced back with a race win in his second weekend with Matt Stone Racing, and didn’t mind giving his former a team a back-hander in the process.
The 2011 Bathurst winner’s career could have been over after a season with only three top 10 finishes, but Stone, the son of the legendary former team owner Jim Stone, thought he could grab the fourtime Supercars race winner and get him back to the front.
Which is what he has done with top 10 finishes in all six races this year and a win, the only team other than Triple Eight in 2024 to take the top step of the podium.
In an emotional and raw interview on Fox post-race Percat opened a few wounds.
“I wanted to quit. And now, round two we’ve won a race!” he said on Fox. “The last 18 months I hated every second of that mob (Walkinshaw Andretti United) so, honestly, the moment I walked into MSR, I knew this is where I needed to be ... it’s a bit surreal.
“I was trying to avoid the track – get
here as late as possible, leave here as quick as possible.”
Days later, he didn’t take a backward step from those comments, but said from the minute he first walked in the door of the MSR workshop in Yatala it was all different.
The win at Albert Park was his first since late 2020 and broke the back of a horror run since leaving Brad Jones Racing at the end of the 2021 season.
“It’s probably a combination,” Percat said when asked if it was more relief or excitement winning at Albert Park. “Honestly, any time you get a win in the main championship in Supercars, it’s an awesome feeling.
“Last year, when you watched Shane and Brodie, you could see they were more than pumped, so it doesn’t matter if you’re winning every week or it’s your first win for a while. It is seriously rewarding as a driver and as a team to get a win, because it is so tight in the category – it’s not easy.
“It was definitely a relief to get one in the bag early in the year and not continue my trend.”
Despite mentally struggling with the
lows of the sport, he never doubted he could climb back to the top. He says it is easy to underestimate MSR, which many see as the little team from Yatala. But he says it is a team of hardcore racers, and that suits him, and that MSR has been punching above its weight, and that isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
“The feeling I’ve had from the car, literally from the out-lap at Ipswich during Test Day 1 to what I drove on the weekend has just been seriously impressive. I’ve only driven at three tracks, but you say Ipswich, Bathurst, and AGP are very different in characteristics, and it felt very good at all of them.
“I’m excited for the rest of the year.
“I said it on the weekend, any team or business has to crawl, walk, and then run. I think we’re still at the walk phase. You still got to make sure you get your processes right, that the car is put together as well as we can possibly do it.
“It’s a good start early, but I would like to think, with how it’s been, we could definitely be on the podium a few more times this year.”
Percat’s swipe at Walkinshaw Andretti
United came around the same time as MSR’s PR man, Slade Perrin, had a run-in with WAU CEO Bruce Stewart after an on-track incident that saw WAU’s Ryan Wood offloading MSR’s Cam Hill out of eighth place on the last lap of the race. Wood was penalised 30 seconds for the incident which left Hill in the sandtrap and unable to take the chequered flag.
Perrin allegedly approached Stewart after the Saturday race and suggested Wood was out of line, who responded verbally and is then reported to have pushed and shoved Perrin. The incident was reported to Motorsport Australia which is investigating.
See Page 28 for our full chat with Nick Percat.
Matt Stone Racing’s Hill and Grove’s Penrite Racing were in the thick of the action across the four Supercars sprint races held in support of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Whilst his teammate Nick Percat took a stunning win in Sunday’s race, Hill’s #4 Camaro was spun by Ryan Wood at Turn 6 on the final lap.
It was a tough blow for Hill, who was on track for a second top-10 of the year in eighth and lost valuable championship points, while Wood was penalised.
This was not the only time Hill found trouble, having dropped from 16th to 20th on Friday due to contact and almost getting rotated at the start of Saturday’s race at Turn 3.
After a tough campaign Hill was frustrated by some “average driving”.
“When it’s not your weekend it’s not your weekend,” Hill said.
“I got punted off in three out of four races. I was running eighth in the last one, which would have been the best result of the weekend and to have it taken away by some average driving was obviously disappointing.
“A few guys out there probably need to practice using their brakes.
“We’ll bounce back, and next up is New Zealand. I’m really looking forward to getting over there.
“I’ll try to stay clear of any black cats and ladders between now and then!”
Another team that found trouble at the wrong moments was Penrite Racing.
Matt Payne found himself in the lead twice but, on both occasions, incidents saw wins slip away.
On Saturday night Payne and Cam Waters tangled at the final corner, leaving both Mustangs in the wall and creating a fiery aftermath.
Then, on Sunday, the #19 was again leading the race, only to be hit by a lockedup Chaz Mostert which sent both Fords to the grass and again allowed a Camaro to take the win.
Penrite Racing team principal Stephen Grove described the driving standards as “pretty bad”.
“The positive note from the weekend is the car has a lot of speed. The negative is the driving standards are pretty bad,” he said.
“Both Matty Payne and Richie Stanaway performed well but the outcome on the weekend was unfortunately taken out of their hands.
“Matty has come a long way now and he will be up there challenging for wins for the rest of his Supercars career. Richie is building and building, and every race on the weekend he got stronger.
“We definitely now have a car that we think will be quick everywhere through the rest of the season.”
Thomas Miles
FOR THE first time in around two decades, no compulsory stop was required at a Supercars Championship round and some loved it while others missed it.
Although there was slightly more racing kilometres than last year, Supercars had little choioce other than to ditch compulsory stops due to losing its pit lane to FIA Formula 2. As a result, drivers did the entirety of all four races on the Soft tyre in the first championship weekend featuring no-stop sprints since Gold Coast 2004.
There is an argument the compulsory tyre changes required in the 2023 Melbourne SuperSprint detracted from the racing.
The 11-lap race on Saturday last year was a prime example where almost the entire field pitted on the penultimate lap only to complete one lap on the harder compound.
Although there was no pit strategy involved in 2024, drivers were still forced to strategically use their soft tyre rubber, as it degraded throughout the race.
One driver who enjoyed the old school style of racing which was a staple in ATCC rounds through the 1980s and 1990s was Mark Winterbottom.
“I loved it,” he told Auto Action
“I have always loved high deg races, especially at Perth because it was like playing chess, which creates good racing.
“You have guys that are pushing but also conserving and if you get it right, you can gain positions.
“The best races are when the tyres go off the quickest and the sprint format is cool.
“The pit stops here were terrible for the racing here. You do one lap on hards and 12 on softs, so I didn’t get it.
It’s hard and it’s fast and sometimes it’s a bit rough, but we call it how we see it and pull no punches.
Plenty of analysis and lots of opinion from some of the most experienced motorsport media people in the business - Bruce Williams, Paul Gover and Andrew Clarke.
“Now you have a strategy where the driver takes control and not the engineer.
“You can see that we are all different because some are aggressive early but can’t make it last or some come home strong.
“The non pit-stops, although controversial, have been mega for the races and produced some of the best racing we have seen in this category for a long time.”
Despite being a non-believer, in general, MSR team owner Matt Stone also gave it a tick of approval.
“My biggest concern leading into the weekend was what the racing would be without pit stops and I think the action delivered was spectacular,” he said.
However, some missed the sight of pit stops which have been a staple of Supercars for so long.
“Pit stops are always great, especially with our category because it gives an extra element of strategy,” Erebus Motorsport’s Jack Le Brocq told Auto Action
“I do miss it and think that is what Supercars racing is about –having that element to it.” Thomas Miles
THE FOUR-car Brad Jones Racing stable will not be split apart by the live pit lane order but Brad Jones is still not a fan of it. With pit stops not taking place at the Melbourne SuperSprint, the live pit lane order will roll into action when compulsory
stops return at the Taupo Super400 next month.
It will be the first glimpse to see how the new rule change for 2024 will impact the racing and strategy game.
After dominating the start of the season,
Triple Eight will return to its familiar advantage of servicing its cars in front of everyone else, ahead of Penrite Racing, Team 18 and Matt Stone Racing, who are all ahead of reigning champions Erebus Motorsport.
Brad Jones Racing battled at Albert Park and as a result slipped from fifth to ninth.
But critically, despite the #8 and #14 team sitting ninth and the #4 and #96 squad being placed 12th in the teams championship, the four-car team will not be separated in the lane.
Jones confirmed this and also his displeasure towards the rule change after a tough time at the Australian Grand Prix.
“They are all together but I did not vote for the live pit order,” Jones told AUTO ACTION.
“I did not like it and have always felt the pit lane order is based on the job you did the year before.
“I am not a big fan at all.”
Thomas Miles
TAUPO SUPER400
PIT LANE ORDER
GARAGES / TEAM
1/2 Triple Eight Race Engineering
3/4 Penrite Racing
5/6 Team 18
7/8 Matt Stone Racing
9/10 Erebus Motorsport
11/12 Walkinshaw Andretti United
13/14 Tickford
15/16 PremiAir Nulon Racing
17/18 Brad Jones Racing #8/#14
19/20 Brad Jones Racing #4/#96
21/22 Dick Johnson Racing
23/24 Blanchard Racing Team
For the second year in a row, Smith raced on home turf on the world stage for Van Amersfoort Racing in F3.
It proved to be a tough weekend for the 21-year-old, finishing 27th in the Saturday Sprint and retiring from the Sunday Feature race after an opening lap clash with Rodin’s Joseph Locke at Turn 11.
Off the track one of the big talking points was the decision to kick Supercars out of the support pits for the first time, in favour of the FIA Formula 2 grid.
It created the strange sight of Supercars being relegated to support status and not making compulsory stops for the first time across an entire championship round for 20 years.
Whilst Smith’s F3 team also competes in F2, he believes Supercars need the garages more than F2, which still completed pit stops in the F1 lane despite having its own garages.
“Having F2 in the pits did not make sense,” Smith told Auto Action.
“They are equipped to drag everything into the F1 pit lane and don’t even use the support pit lane.
“They also only do pit stops on Sunday and Supercars are racing from every day from Thursday.
“It meant Supercars could not be equipped to do pit stops but F2 and F3 are always able to.
“I was part of it and thought they did a better job last year.”
Smith was also critical of the call not to allow general admission fans into the support paddock area, meaning spectators could not enjoy the sight of the F2, F3 and Supercars teams and cars up close.
“Last year that (fans in the paddock) was such a good addition because no one does that in Europe,” he continued.
“I was talking to Broc Feeney and we thought it was such a shame – why did they do this?
“I don’t get it to be honest so, hopefully, they can do something because I had so many people message me.
“It is annoying because people want to see the action, so hopefully it changes next year.”
Whilst having a taste of Super2 lifestyle was a very different experience for the Supercars teams, they found a way to make it work with some tools and personnel moving to the garage and others staying at base in the paddock during on-track sessions.
Teams owners Brad Jones and Matt Stone both want improvements if Supercars renews its contract with the Australian Grand Prix and returns.
“I think it can be done a bit better,” Jones said of the paddock.
“This was our first swing at it and we definitely need more help from the AGPC.
“Supercars will need to work through that and make it better for us if we come back in the future.”
“It has been absolutely fine,” Stone said.
“Supercars and the Grand Prix Corporation have done a good job at making it work.
“There are obviously a lot of things that can be done better, particularly getting the fans in and making a better schedule for TV.
“We just need to tidy up a few things and make it better for the fans, but logistically it has been fine.”
Thomas Miles
AFTER COLLECTING an impressive podium on the Friday of the Melbourne SuperSprint, Mark Winterbottom believes Team 18 is on a promising path.
At both Bathurst and Albert Park, both Team 18 drivers Winterbottom and new recruit David Reynolds have displayed impressive race pace.
‘Frosty”’has moved forward in all six races, rising a combined total of 39 positions with a strong second place in Race 4 the highlight.
Winterbottom said a significant part of the strong result was a renewed sense of confidence that has been discovered since the arrival of a new engineering line up fronted by team principal Adrian Burgess, technical director Dr Geoffrey Slater and #18 race engineer Som Sharma.
Despite winning at Darwin, Winterbottom “always felt vulnerable” behind the wheel last year, but that is no longer the case with a stronger grip on Gen3.
“It is awesome reward for the team because a lot of work has gone into the start of this season,” Winterbottom told Auto Action.
“Even in between rounds, after Bathurst, I knew we had really good race pace but qualified terribly, so we had the pace and knew if we could qualify well a good result was possible.
“It is so nice because last year I felt that if we qualified well, I was still always vulnerable because we were out of sequence.
“Here last year I qualified fifth and felt I was almost a road block (and finished ninth) but today I rocked out with my chest out because I had my confidence back.
“The biggest thing we are understanding is why we are going bad, when we are..
“Som is very data driven and my feedback and his data is correlating really well and we are making changes and they are working.”
Although Winterbottom struggled to replicate the one-lap speed afterwards, he
still rose four and 10 positions respectively in the final two races and is adamant there will be more “opportunities” in 2024.
“We will have our good and bad days but when we are good enough, we can compete,” he said.
“Our next goal is to do it again and more often. There is so much light at the end of the tunnel.”
For the man behind the team, Charlie Schwerkolt, it was sweet reward for the risks he took reshuffling the team after the 2023 Bathurst 1000.
“It has been a full rebuild of the team over the Christmas period,” he said.
“I am really proud of Frosty to get up there and drive so well, not frying his tyres to get second.
“I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves but if you put the right structure in place, with the right people and culture, you can get results.
“This is the hardest gig in the world so we have just got to be consistent.
“It has been like starting all over ahead so we need to keep learning our cars and ourselves.”
Burgess was thrilled to get a trophy in just his second round at the team and credited the connection between the entire team.
“It is good for everybody not just myself and great to see the whole team working so well, so early.
“We have all known each other a long time which brings that familiarity and we talk the same language.
“But let’s not underestimate the job the team did before this year. We have two very good cars and drivers and a great group of people.
“This is the level we want to be at, so we have to keep our heads down to keep the team going further forward.”
Thomas Miles
Max Verstappen’s chief mechanic, Brit, Lee Stevenson left Red Bull on March 28, reportredly for Sauber.
The talented Stevenson joined the Milton-Keynes squad way back in 2006 having got his F1 start with Jordan Grand Prix in 1999. He has worked on all of Red Bull’s cars: RB2 to RB19 in an 18-year stint which started in 2006 as a #2 mechanic.
In 2014 he became a #1 mechanic and was appointed Verstappen’s chief mechanic in 2023, having worked closely with the Dutch ace when he joined Red Bull in 2016. Stevenson quipped, “Onto the next chapter, which starts on Monday when I fly to Japan and start work with my new team at the other end of the pitlane.”
Sauber – the Stake F1 Team – will be absorbed by Audi in 2026.
Formula One owner, Liberty Media is well on the way to acquiring Moto GP from Dorna Sports in a reputed 4.2 billion Euros deal.
Liberty acquired F1 in 2016, and Dorna what became known as Moto GP in 1991.
Liberty has produced stratospheric growth in F1 via its Netflix ‘Drive to Survive’ show and additional GPs. They see great sense in aligning under one roof the Big Two global motor racing franchises.
While the deal is subject to regulatory approval –CVC Capital Partners were forced to sell Dorna by the European anti-trust authorities when they sold Formula 1 to Liberty – it seems likely the deal will be announced by Liberty Media President/CEO Greg Maffei as early as this week.
Having wowed Australian race-fans in Adelaide and Melbourne in March, Guenther Steiner will spread the love in his new role as a Miami Grand Prix ambassador. With deep experience in motorsport administration in rallying and NASCAR as well as F1, Steiner gained rockstar status via the ‘Drive To Survive’ franchise. His nobullshit, comedic talent shone through in addition to his day job as Haas F1 Team Principal, a role which ended when his contract wasn’t renewed for 2024.
Steiner’s delivery is very much in synch with American razzamatazz. As Miami GP President Tyler Epp said, “Having Guenther’s experience, reputation and candour attached to our event will undoubtedly add to the excitement and elevate race weekend to a new level.”
DAVID BRABHAM is heading back to the track for a full-time competition comeback in the UK. The former Le Mans winner and onetime grand prix racer will be driving one of the BT62 supercars (right) built before the collapse of Brabham Automotive at the start of the year.
The 58-year-old got an early taster for the future when he drove a BT62 during the high-speed demonstration runs at the Adelaide Motorsport Festival.
The car, now painted white, is best known as the green-and-gold supercar that claimed the-then unofficial lap record at Mount Panorama at 1 minute 58.68 seconds in 2019 with Luke Youlden at the wheel.
“Well, it feels like therapy,” Brabham told Auto Action
“Just getting into the car today, you know, you’re back in an environment you just know so well. And I feel comfortable in it. Things come back really quickly.
“And it was nice to get into it now before I actually drive in the UK in the serious stuff.”
Brabham’s program for 2024 will see him partnering Paul Bailey, who took the British GT Cup last year driving a Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo.
Bailey had originally planned to compete with his Brabham BT62,
then switched to a McLaren, before settling on the Lamborghini.
Now he will roll out the Brabham with the intention of defending his title.
For Brabham, it’s simple.
“I’m driving with Paul Bailey. I spoke to Paul. We were having a chat about it,” he said.
“And I said ‘Look, I’d love to drive with you one day’. He said ‘What about this year? So, literally, within a five-minute conversation it was done. Cool, right?”.
Brabham is out to win but admits he could be rusty after more than 10 years on the sidelines.
“I haven’t done a full season since 2012. But I never retired. I never said ‘Ok, that’s it, I’m hanging up my boots’,” he told Auto Action “I never said it because I knew at
some point, like everyone else does, they get the bug again. And I was getting the bug.
“It’s a dragon. You can’t give it up.”
Brabham was in Adelaide during one of his regular returns to Australia, taking in the Motorsport Festival before moving on to the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.
Paul Gover
AUTO ACTION is saddened to report the passing last week, after a sudden heart-attack, of former touring car entrepreneur Steve Frazer.
Frazer was best known as Peter Brock’s manager, and the MD of Advantage International, the marketing company which was originally a partnership with musical entrepreneur Glenn Wheatley (Wheatley Sport) in
the 1980s before morphing into Advantage International. It came to Brock’s rescue by creating Advantage Racing late in 1991. It acquired the two Mobil-backed Commodores that Brock and Larry Perkins had campaigned that year under a Perkins Mobil team banner, and set up an Advantage Racing team base in North Melbourne.
In the end, the team was wound up when Brock, and the Mobil deal,
Flame-out: Peter Brock pedals the Mobil 1 Advantage International Commodore around Phillip Island, in 1993. Image: AUTO ACTION ARCHIVES Opposite: Steve Frazer and wife Vonnie.
transferred to the Holden Race Team at the end of 1993.
Frazer’s motorsport promotions also included event promotion – such as the 1995 Peter Brock Classic at Calder and 2002 Queensland 500 Supercars events, several Australian Safaris and Round Australia rallies, and three World Superbike events. He also put Brock’s Super Tourer Volvo deal together.
SEBASTIAN VETTEL is “unsure” about a potential Le Mans 24 Hours debut after a “very nice” test last week behind the wheel of the Porsche Penske 963 Hypercar.
Vettel drove Porsche Penske Motorsport’s FIA World Endurance Championship challenger at Motorland Aragon and covered 118 laps and 581km behind the wheel. The four-time F1 world champion also completed a sim day and a first drive at Porsche’s test track in Weissach.
Vettel made it clear no decision has been made but is considering a Le Mans debut after his experience driving the 963.
“I was curious how these cars behave, and that was the reason for the test. It was a very nice experience, I enjoyed it a lot, I had a lot of fun,” Vettel said in a press conference.
“Now I need to think and decide, and make my mind up what I maybe want to
do in terms of racing in the future.
“But I don’t know yet.”
Since calling time on a highly successful Formula 1 career that contained 299 Grand Prix starts, 53 wins, 122 podiums and 57 pole positions at the end of 2022, Vettel has not done any competitive racing.
Porsche Penske Motorsport’s current WEC team is lead by Australian star Matt Campbell, Michael Christensen and Frederic Makowiecki in car #5 and Kevin Estre, Andre Lotterer and Laurens Vanthoor in car #6.
But the team has hinted at running a third entry at Le Mans and, whilst the likes of Mathieu Jaminet, Nick Tandy, Dane Cameron, Felipe Nasr and Josef Newgarden race the 963 in IMSA, the prospect of Vettel could be too good to resist.
Thomas Miles
Leading the way was Mansell as he collected some important points by scoring a pair of 10th place finishes.
Boosted by a podium in Bahrain, the ART driver came with high hopes which were further fuelled by fighting for second early in the Sprint.
But his left rear tyre was “never the same” after early race contact with Martin Stenshorne and he drifted out of the top 10 after running wide at turn 11 before reclaiming 10th late in the race.
In the Feature Mansell found himself in 11th as the finish neared but was able to catch and pass Arvin Lindblad with smart tyre management to snatch 10th at the death.
Mansell was pleased to collect some points where he scored his first top 10 on home debut last year.
“We were right in the fight but we got a bit of contact and that put us on the back foot.
He made up five places before losing some ground by bouncing over the Turn 9 kerb before “losing the downforce” and spinning Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak into the Turn 1 gravel.
Smith’s Feature Race was over barely after it began when he was sandwiched between Joseph Loake and Cian Shields.
After a tough weekend, Smith is eyeing the in-season test at Barcelona on April 16-18 as a chance to reset.
“The test could not come at a better time. It was a bad weekend,” Smith told Auto Action.
“On Sunday we had some good battles while trying to keep the tyres going for the whole race which was tough.
“Maybe with a couple more laps we could have moved further forward which would have been nice, but it’s more points which matters for the championship.”
Smith had a tough time behind the wheel of his Van Amersfoort Racing machine.
“Overall I feel that we had good pace again, and to be in a strong position for the sprint race gave us hope for another trophy but, ultimately it wasn’t to be,” Mansell said.
It all started in practice where a setup
mistake saw the Aussie run with far too low ride height.
As a result Smith went into qualifying with a new floor, but with limited laps and confidence and was last, 3.2s off the pace.
“We need to work on our one-lap pace, it is just not there.
“I was not very confident after the issue in practice and when you start near the back it makes the weekend super tricky, so I need to sharpen my one-lap pace.
“I was getting better results 12 months ago. I feel like I have done a lot of work since then and I am better prepared, but going slower which does not make sense.
“We need to start building some confidence.”
Thomas Miles
THE AUSTRALIAN Motorsport Hall of Fame has welcomed a new batch of inductees in 2024, ranging from all levels of racing on two and four wheels. Elfin founder and Australian Sports car champion Garrie Cooper, five time national Motocross and four time Mr.MX winner Craig Dack, tireless Speedway driver, promoter, administrator and active volunteer Bill Barrows, Australian motorcycle racing trailblazer and 500cc Grand Prix race winner Jack Ahearn and drag racing pioneer Graham Withers were all inducted. In a special ceremony the inductees were congratulated by five time ATCC champion Dick Johnson on the Thursday of the Australian Grand Prix.
Hampton Downs in NZ buzzed with excitement over the March 22-24 weekend, celebrating the racing achievements of Graeme Lawrence and the entire Lawrence family.
Graeme was an Australasian crowd favourite in the 2.5-litre and F5000 Tasman era, winning the title in a howling V6 Ferrari Dino 246T in 1970 (pictured), and coming close again in a thundering Lola T332 Chev F5000 in 1975.
Australian guests at the celebration included former F500 rivals Bruce Allison, Warwick Brown, Paul Bernasconi and Janelle Maber (Max Stewart’s daughter).
“The dinner was a sold out. A charity auction for a montage of photographs from Graeme, Tony, myself, and Wayne’s motorsport career raised over $4000 for the Men’s Prostate Foundation,” Brian Lawrence said. “All four of us have had this disease and are fortunately all free of it now.”
AUSSIE FANS of the rough-and-tumble British Touring Car Championship will be able to plug directly into the action in 2024 through an unlikely source – TikTok.
It is the first time a major motorsport series will be streamed live on the social media platform and covers all rounds of this year’s BTCC season beginning at Donington Park on April 27-28.
“This agreement will introduce the BTCC to a massive new and completely different demographic – a younger and more diverse audience – which is exactly what we, and in fact all of motorsport, are looking to achieve,” said BTCC boss, ex-patriate Australian, Alan Gow.
AFTER ALMOST a year of being dormant, Sydney International Speedway made a long-awaited comeback that was hailed as a success on and off the track.
The sight of Sprintcars being back in the NSW capital was a welcome one after the original 2023/24 schedule was cancelled, promoters walked away and the venue’s last race meeting was back in April 2023.
But after the hard work of the team led by director Yvonne Boldy, track manager Gary Willmington, curators Braydon Willmington and Marty Perovich, commentator Stu McCarthy and track assistant Ashley Anthony, the multimillion dollar facility was back in action.
Despite Sydney rain threatening to spoil the occasion, Jy Corbet put in a storming drive to win the Sprintcars feature.
With a big crowd in the stands and entertaining racing on show, Willmington hailed the meeting as a success.
“It was just great to see it happen,” he told Auto Action
“We were pretty happy with it all and learnt a lot.
“It was a pretty good crowd, with over 4000 people there, which was better than we expected.
“A Shame we didn’t get to run the feature race for the Late Models and Fender Benders because of the rain but the main thing is we got the Sprintcars in and it was great racing.
“This was just stage one of a very big picture for the future.”
Some of the biggest issues holding back Sydney International Speedway focused around drainage, lighting, parking and the lease.
New drainage systems are in place
whilst the lighting was checked and the track reworked.
This is Willmington’s sixth decade in motorsport but he described bringing Sydney International Speedway as his biggest challenge.
“I have worked in motor racing my entire life and getting those gates open was probably the hardest thing I have done. It was a challenge,” he said.
“One of the things was so much negativity everywhere we went and too many doubters to get a lot of support.
“We were lucky with a select few people that gave us 100% support.
“The government was very good being right behind us and helping us all the way.
“We managed to get some quick decisions which made it possible to get the thing open.
“But we had to literally write pretty much thousands of pages of brand new documents for traffic management and emergency plans.
“The list of plans and documents we had to write basically from scratch was over the top and we had to get a new licence.”
Part of the venue’s facelift included a slightly reworked track surface and,
whilst Willmington admitted it was far from perfect on Saturday night, drivers were impressed.
The track manager confirmed the surface will be boosted by extra clay come the next event.
“The shape and angles of the track worked perfectly,” he said.
“We had some really good racing with some guys going from 18th to fourth and 14th to second, so that proved you could pass cars and run the top, middle and bottom.
“The track surface itself was a little bit harder than it should have been, mainly because we were waiting on extra clay which we have coming.
“Once we get that we will be able to prepare the track to a much better level then what we were able to do.
“We had to compromise a little bit on Saturday night with our aim to get the gates open.
“The surface had to be harder because it was a little bit thin in a few areas but that will be fixed for the next event.”
After waiting almost a year for racing to return to Sydney, the next meeting will only be a few weeks away on Saturday, April 20.
Thomas Miles
THE CHOCOLATE will taste a little bit sweeter for Tate Frost (pictured), who flew to the 2024 Easter Sprintcar Trail title with a blazing drive at Premier Speedway. Frost secured the crown with a commanding lights-toflag performance in the Warrnambool finale.
The Easter Trail is the last highlight in the busy Sprintcar season, dating back to the 1980s.
The three-night affair fired up at Avalon Raceway where Daniel Pestka broke through.
Starting third, Pestka hit the lead on lap 11 after Domain Ramsay retired from the front.
For the remainder of the race the #S27 was unchallenged, cruising to a commanding 2.2s win over Brett Milburn.
The roadshow then ventured across to South Australia to Mount Gambier’s Borderline Speedway.
Pestka appeared to be in the box seat to go back to back, leading the first 16 laps from pole position.
But behind him, Frost was on the charge and perfectly placed when lapped traffic became a factor at the halfway mark.
On the inside Frost found an opening and shot through at Turn 2 and survived a three-lap dash to beat Jock Goodyer.
The third and final stop was Warrnambool’s Premier
Speedway where Frost thrilled the crowd.
It proved to be a wild night with a number of crashes causing carnage in the heats with Goodyer and Hallett not immune from the damage.
Frost led from pole in the feature and was soon in a league of his own, building a massive lead until late yellows created some drama.
Despite Hallett mounting a spirited late challenge, he could not stop Frost from nailing a perfect drive to snatch both the Night 3 feature and Easter Trail title.
Full coverge in the next issue of AUTO ACTION.
Thomas Miles
is about to kick off in Canberra.
An influx of new world-class cars, and a growing group of speedy youngsters, will inject some muchneeded uncertainty into the series.
Veteran Scott Pedder, as fast as anyone in recent memory, should also provide genuine opposition to the factory Toyotas of Harry and Lewis Bates.
The Bates team from Canberra has been able to play a one-sided game in recent years but that could easily change in season 2024 with a Top 10 line-up crowded with relative newbies in cars as good as anything ever available to non-factory drivers in Australia.
There is a bunch of the Rally2 cars which have
levelled the field, with most drivers going for a Skoda, as well as Hyundai Rally2 cars and the modified Subaru Impreza for former champion Molly Taylor.
The last time the series looked so competitive - open is not the right word - is when there were genuine factory entries by Subaru, Mitsubishi and Toyota.
But that was in the early 2000s and the only survivors from the superstar drivers of the time are Pedder and Neal Bates, although he has virtually stopped driving.
“This is the best field in a very long time. There are a lot of people who are making big steps forwards this year,” Bates told Auto Action.
“I’m very excited about Canberra. I think there will be some people there who will be right on the pace.
I want to see who can step up and make the series what it should be.
“The Maguires from Tasmania are doing the ARC for the second year and Alex Rullo was running third in Canberra last year.
“Obviously Scott Pedder is very quick, and Molly Taylor was very competitive last year in Canberra.”
But surely the Toyota team only wants to win, especially with Harry Bates driving a new Rally2 version of the Toyota Yaris which has been airfreighted to Australia for the start of the ARC.
“Of course we like winning, but you also want to earn it,” said Bates.
The challenge is even bigger for Pedder, a 40-something former national champion who has imported a Skoda Fabia Rally2 car for a genuine attempt at a second title.
“I want to see if I’m still good enough,” Pedder told Auto Action
“I think we can beat them. Will it be easy? Hell, no.” The 2024 Australian Rally Championship commences in Canberra on April 5-7.
Paul Gover
2024 RALLY OF CANBERRA
TOP 10 STARTING LIST
1. Harry Bates/Coral Taylor Toyota Yaris Rally2
2. Lewis Bates/Anthony McLoughlin Toyota Yaris AP4
3. Eddie Maguire/Zak Brakey Skoda Fabia R5
4. Scott Pedder/Glenn Macneall Skoda Fabia R5
5. Alex Rullo/Steve Glenney Hyundai i20 Rally2
6. Steve Maguire/Ben Searcy Skoda Fabia R5
7. Molly Taylor/Andrew Sarandis Subaru Impreza P5
8. Jamie Luff/Brad Luff Toyota Yaris AP4
9. Tom Clarke/Ryan Preston Ford Fiesta R5
10. Peter Rullo/James Marquet Hyundai i20 Rally2
SVG’s schedule, mixing Xfinity and ‘main-game’ NASCAR, is making for one busy tiime – here at the Circuit of the Americas.
SHANE VAN Gisbergen could be forgiven for being slightly busy processing everything after a wild fortnight in America.
Van Gisbergen had little time to rest behind the wheel at COTA where he made his NASCAR Cup Series return in addition to his usual Xfinity Series program.
It was in the second tier where the Kiwi made the biggest impression, out-racing road course expert AJ Allmendinger to be cruising to a near-certain win.
But, with four laps to go, the race was turned on its head and the Kiwi found himself in an insane fight for victory with Austin Hill and Kyle Larson during double overtime.
In the end Larson prevailed on fresh tyres whilst van Gisbergen crossed the line second, only to be demoted to 27th due to a 30s penalty for cutting a corner.
“It was a crazy race and we got better and better,” SVG said.
“In that last restart he (Hill) just drove
through me at 1. I guess that is how it is here and I stood up for myself.”
A day later van Gisbergen was back, in the Cup Series, and was just outside the top 10 before a penalty for speeding in the pits and a gearbox issue restricted him to 21st. SVG continued to show progress on the Richmond oval, qualifying 12th before finishing 15th.
He will not be the only the only Supercars race winner in the NASCAR paddock at Martinsville this weekend.
Tickford star Cameron Waters will make his Truck Series debut with support from Ford Performance with ThorSport Racing. Waters admitted he will be “thrown into the deep end without any testing” but is excited to “finally be given the chance to race.”
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race will take place at 10.30 AEDT Saturday, April 6, whilst the Xfinity Series goes racing at 09.30 the following day.
Thomas Miles
MOTORSPORT MEDIA USUALLY ENJOY ALL-AREAS ACCESS AT THE GRAND PRIX BUT, FOR A DAY, CHRIS LAMBDEN WENT GENERAL ADMISSION WITH THE FAMILY … IT WAS DIFFERENT …
OVER 452,000 people, over four days, set a new record for attendance at Australia’s Grand Prix. Among them were a solid number of grandstand ticket-holders reclaiming favourite spots and a growing number of corporate guests enjoying the luxury of the various hospitality suites and, the king of them all, the F1 Paddock Club. Entry to the suites involves four-figure sums – three days in the Red Bull Energy Station will cost you – or more likely your company, or your host – a cool $6550. Across the track, the ‘Slipstream’ tower, overlooking the dramatic Turn 8/9 is good value at $4375 – $3075 if you just want Sunday, $2425 for Qualifying day alone.
Grandstand seats range from $450 to $700 for the top spot – Brabham Stand, inside Turn 1, for example.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed access to the International media centre, which caters for the FIA-accredited writers and photographers covering the event for outlets around the world, along with a fair sprinkling of locals – some restricted to the less glam National media centre.
By necessity, the International media centre, on top of the pits, is chocker with TV screens and overlooks the grid. An FIA pass gets you into the F1 Paddock. Nearby there’s a barrista churning out free cappuccinos. It is a place of work, but it does allow you to absorb the
full atmosphere of the whole thing, in modest comfort – and insulated from corporates who might be enjoying it just a bit too much!
I hadn’t planned to be there this year. The recent alliance with AA came very late in the piece, along with a standard media pass. But back in September, my (young adult) kids had a Father’s Day idea. They bought a fistful of Saturday, Qualifying day, General Admission tickets and invited the old man to join them. I could hardly refuse!
It’s the walk-up, base ticket at $119 each (just $10 for kids) and the most economic way to experience Formula 1.
So, yup, for a day, it was back to how it once was many moons ago – out there with the
real core fans. The one thing I brought to the table was a godsend though – my media car pass, which would see us able to park across at the golf-course, a few hundred metres walk from the nearest trackside viewing spots. By the end of the day, it would be worth its weight in gold.
Among my little group were a couple of fringe F1 fans (Drive to Survive recruits, who hadn’t shown any real interest before that), and a couple of raw recruits who’d never been to the grand prix before. It was going to be interesting.
Logistics and other commitments meant we weren’t going to get there before 10am (gates open at 8.30am) and would need to head out
If you find a good spot, you need to protect it! Image:
at 5pm, straight after F1 Qualifying. Still, quite a big day.
The first thing that confronted us, of course, was one of the massive merchandising areas, and one pair –having arrived sans headware – wandered off to see what they could get. They returned a few minutes later to report that, at $90 for an Oscar Piastri/McLaren cap, they’d give it a miss. Later in the day, as the cloud cleared and the sun beamed through, they changed their mind …
We’d picked the spectator mound at the rapid Turn 9/10 left-right as a good starting point and, for a while – before the F3s hit the track – it seemed like a good option. All the obvious regulars had come well-equipped with folding chairs marking out their territory and there was a quiet ripple of anticipation as the next track session loomed.
Out came F3 … and everyone stood up. For anyone under 5’10” that presented a bit of a visibility issue, though the screen opposite offered a wider view. Note to self: steeper grass mounds would be a plus. Still, GA is all about atmosphere and, in among the hardy regulars, there was a certain buzz.
Formula 3 came and went; couple of Aussies; impossible to hear the circuit commentary. Note to self: should have
brought ear pods etc to access FM circuit commentary.
From up on the mound, we figured that a spot opposite – on the inside of the circuit –at ground level and, in places, literally a metre or two from the circuit, might be good. The crowd looked to be modest – we’d aim to get there a little later.
First though, we crossed the air bridge across the lake, heading to the main Fan Zone area for a look. The sight of row upon row of fans still lining the Melbourne Walk –long after any of the F1 personnel would have passed by – was quite sobering. What, or who, are they waiting for?
We split up. One couple ended up at the Espy bar for a cool drink. The others headed off towards the Turn 2 spectator zone. It was packed, so they pressed on and walked all the way round the north end of the circuit, back to the cross-lake air bridge. By the end of the day, their iPhone pedometers had recorded over 10,000 steps. Good on them … Me? I cheated. For half an hour I ducked into the media zone just outside the F1 Paddock, grabbed a cappuccino, and bumped into a couple of old mates – longtime F1 photographer Keith Sutton (now retired) and an old colleague from across the water (Christchurch, NZ) – Grant McDonald, former magazine publisher, now managing Liam Lawson. He’s done that since Liam’s first days in car racing and, right now, finds himself in the middle of a particularly intriguing F1 scenario.
That’s the thing about the coffee stop – you never know who you’re going to bump into … Back across the bridge, I spend some time wandering up and down the lake-side zone while F1 P3 was on, finally finding a really good spot. There were people hanging off trees a bit further down, beyond the Turn 10 exit, but by the end of F1 P3 I’d found a view worth having.
The kids were heading back that way and, while it was four deep as the F1’s headed back to the garages, it soon dispersed and I was able to stake a claim to some fence space, which we jealously guarded for the rest of the day!
If you draw a line extending the short straight between the high-speed T9 and T10
left-right back to the lakeside fence, that’s where we were. It would mean standing for as long as we wanted to be there with an unimpeded view, but it was a great spot.
Imagine, if you will, the sight and sound of F1 cars looming up right next to the concrete, just two metres away (albeit just the top TV camera mount visible), but then turning in at over 300kmh, now in full view, and the suddenness and poetry in motion (well, for some) of a grand prix car’s almost violent change of direction as it spears into and out of the second element (T10) and away down the straight.
Just 100 metres further on down the pathway and this view dissolves into more of a side-on perspective … nowhere near as fascinating.
For me, this was worth the price of admission, never mind having to stand up all day ... No-one in Paddock Club, or any of the corporate boxes, or even the Media Centre was seeing this – F1 drivers earning their dough, up close and at ground level.
Frankly, my little crew could take or leave Formula 2 – a load of unrecognisable names and a little too much Safety Car – so we sent a couple of them off to acquire some food and drinks – but by the time F1 qualifying approached, we were in situ, with an uninterrupted view.
It raised the eyebrows of even the newest of the newbies. For me it was fascinating – for example, noting that while many were flicking up a gear between the two apexes, the Red Bulls were geared to pull all the way through, in the same gear. That Honda clearly has some torque ...
There were some ‘moments’ as it got super serious; a few rear Red Pirelli sidewalls were stressed to the max as their pilot asked just a bit too much.
For a lifelong F1 tragic, and for the obvious regulars surrounding us, this was just great. For the newbies, not so much – just a flash of speed and colour, and a seat would have been good …
We had to depart after F1 Qualifying. As I said, the car park pass was gold. After seven hours more-or-less on your feet, the thought of trecking out, to a tram-stop or whatever, was something my car-load were thrilled to give a miss.
So, with plans to grow the crowd next year – probably involving more grandstands – what does the Grand Prix Corp need to do to adequately deal with even more GAs and boost their ‘fan experience’? The mounds are great for the hardy regulars who think to bring their own seats – but could they be a bit steeper, and more of them? A load of the tiered, bare concrete ‘stands’, of the kind on the Turn 2 exit, would make a huge difference along fence-line areas such as where we were – there’s no room there for grandstands or corporate and it would allow many more to enjoy an uninterrupted view.
That’s the key thing for the GA fan base –most of them were having a great time, just as long as they can get some form of clear view, ideally with the ability to sit down, even as they migrate from spot to spot. So yes, a load of those concrete viewing stands would be a big plus …
In terms of the show, for the first-timers in our group in particular, Saturday had one major flaw – the scheduling. They were there to see F1 … and Supercars. Apart from the fact that access to the Supercars Paddock was forbidden (Why? Don’t tell me OH&S or I’ll throw up!), Saturday’s schedule, with Supercars qualifying first up, at 9am, and the race not until 5pm, didn’t go down well. Supercars needed to precede F1 Qualifying … As I said, F2/F3 really didn’t hit the spot with my crew, especially the first-timers: a load of youngsters that no-one recognised, in F1 ‘lookalikes’ with a fair share of Safety Cars – something for the AGP to consider ...
Tidy those few things up and GA, at $119, isn’t bad value when considered against other major sport. An entry-level AFL Grand Final ticket, if you can get one, is $185 –but of course you get a seat. Guess you might get a Taylor Swift seat, up the back somewhere for that. Night sessions at the Aus Open tennis will cost you from $90 to $250 … though Finals are through the roof ($2000 I’m told).
On that basis, Grand Prix GA isn’t bad value at all. Tidy up a couple of things and the bigger crowd being touted for next year might well sell out pretty quickly as well …
F2 (and F3) – cool for ‘purists’, but not so much for an Aussie ‘big event’crowd? And a bit pricey ... Image: PETER NORTON
THE GRAND PRIX WAS ITS USUAL MAJOR EVENT SPECTACULAR AND SUCCESSFUL SELL-OUT: BUT COULD IT BE EVEN BETTER IN 2025? YUP …
SO, AGAIN, a record crowd packed Albert Park, a sell-out from Friday to Sunday. More entrances and facilities are in the pipeline to grow the number further next year – they’re determined to get to 500,000, and frankly, I’m sure they will.
So what do we make of our biggest motor race, certainly biggest audience, of the year?
There’s no real issue selling tickets – let’s face it, most people’s prime motivation for being there is Formula 1, whether they’re lifelong ‘tragics’ or new-found Drive to Survivers. Bathurst is our traditional biggie, our AFL Final; the Grand Prix more like a Taylor Swift invasion –once a year – a major, major event. Tickets are hard to come by and some change hands at inflated cost.
Frankly, The GP Corp could wipe half the support show and everyone would still turn up anyway – but that’s not the point. Melbourne has a reputation as one of, if not the, best major events capital in the world. So, could it be better?
The answer is a resounding yes. While a few of us have had a bit of a giggle at Supercars having to deal with the realities of being a fourthranked support category (we’ve all been there!), the treatment of Australia’s top professional category this time round was close to disgraceful.
with Chris LambdenIf there’s one element of this annual extravaganza that the average punter wants to see and be involved in, other than F1, it’s the Supercars show. For them to be tossed out of their pit lane, and for F2 not to even then bother using it, is pathetic. For their on-track schedule to primarily be first or last thing (Sunday aside), is also demeaning. To not allow public access to the Supercars Paddock is …. (insert your own adjective).
For most part, the teams seemed to just try to get on with it – and the one upside was no pit stops in the sprint races (a must from here on) –but it must change.
The poor old Porsches were close to racing with headlights on.
You know where I’m going with this. We’ve had two years of F2 and F3 dominating the support show and, honestly, that’s enough. Both are totally Euro/Middle East based, with Melbourne the one exception. And while I appreciate that they are the ‘Stairways to Heaven’ (the route to F1) they are no different
to any other national category that populates Australian motorsport –some very good guys at the front; others further back, on the grid because someone came up with the dosh which, in both of these cases. is very healthy seven-figure sum per annum ($3.6m for F2 I believe) … This year, there were two Aussies in F3, none in F2; the rest just names. Hard to relate to for the average Aussie spectator.
Flying that show half-way around the world ain’t cheap either. 52 cars, drivers, team personnel … has to be well into the millions – over five I did hear.
In this era of cost-of-living issues and so on, five mill would be a worthwhile and good-looking saving – though it has to be viewed in context. Victoria is the Australian state where the party/premier in power adopted a ‘whatever the cost’ (which they do a bit of) approach to extending the GP contract. Don’t forget, facing an election not so long ago, the same mob blew close to $600 million by committing to,
then (post-election) cancelling a Commonwealth Games. So $5m? Small change! …
However, and I’m sure someone will correct me if it’s not the case, my understanding is that F2/F3 was very much foisted on the Australian GP as part of the negotiation of its extended contract (to 2037 no less).
So, even if economics and, frankly, demand were to point to the polite withdrawal of Australia from staging the F2/F3 championship rounds, we might just be stuck with it (though, as sport keeps reminding us, contracts can be varied/bought out ... and, hey, Victoria’s already paid out a motza to dump the Games, so what’s the big deal! …).
There are other good reasons to politely say au revoir to F2/3. Australian motorsport has a range of good spectator-friendly categories which would love to support the GP and Supercars – all, at a time when the general economic situation isn’t helping their situation. They’d be more than keen to strut their stuff (and their sponsors) in front of the audience –at-track and on TV – that the Grand Prix commands.
So, AGP, if you’re listening, it’s time to consider ‘Buy Australian’ …
THE OTHER fascinating thing to come out of the GP itself was the punishment doled out to Fernando
Alonso after George Russell lost front downforce and veered off into the concrete on the last lap.
Opinions are obviously divided. I’m very much from the old school which says, if Fernando was, with Russell closing in, lifting early to both get a slow-in fast-out exit onto the long back section to try and keep him at bay, as well as simply disrupting George’s thought process, well … that’s called racing isn’t it?
There was no contact – George was a fair way behind – and had the outcome not been so spectacular, it might have escaped the Stewards’ attention anyway. So, a penalty based on outcome as much as anything? Hmmmmm.
While the whole competition oversight of motorsport is becoming increasingly ‘pastel’ (read conservative …) as we cruise (saving battery, tyres and fuel) into the 2020s, this incident brought a new vocabulary to it.
Fernando was found guilty of “potentially dangerous driving”. Potentially. Potentially? That means maybe. So, not charged with dangerous driving, but ‘maybe’?
Imagine you’re driving to work and a traffic policeman pulls you over and says to you “Sir, I believe you were POTENTIALLY speeding …”
Think about it! …..
PUBLISHER/DIRECTOR Bruce Williams
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NO POINT talking parity when Mustangs take each other out of the race.
In the Sunday race at the Grand Prix the two Red Bull Camaros had to race each other.
They did it in a professional way and subsequently no contact. Mustang drivers continue to make silly mistakes which result in poor finishes.
I feel the car speed is there, but no one is home under the helmet.
I’m a one-eyed Ford supporter but Red Bull as a team are so professional.
Their only problem is managing the two dominant drivers who are both in championship contention.
Nomadic Phil
Somewhere in his van..
Publisher’s note: Thanks Phil, hope the permanent holiday is going well. Yes it was a case of what could have been for the Ford Mustang mounted drivers, but how good was it to see Nick Percat take a win and deliver Matt Stone’s small team another Supercar win.
I WAS interested to read in your last issue that there is some disagreement within the RACE Board on how Supercars is to move forward.
Somehow, RACE has to find a way of increasing the number of events in the season – 12 is barely enough to maintain any interest momentum. A shorter, more compact season would be one way of maintaining interest with current events, but more events are needed – where is Phillip Island, where is QR, where is Winton?
With teams having no ownership stake now and simply making ends meet, RACE is somehow going to have to negotiate a deal with the teams to grow event numbers. That’s not going to be easy. The whole idea of Gen-3 was to create a cheaper, more efficient, lowcost race car, so that teams could operate them more cost effectively. Gee, that went well, didn’t it.!
We have one-off hot rods reportedly costing close to a million bucks to build and, by all accounts, not cheap to maintain.
So, good luck with funding more events! Maybe a more compact season, with a decent off-season, is the answer. It seems to work for many other sports.
Roger Gilchrist Dromana, VICIS IT just me, or having sampled it for two years, are we over Formula 2 and Formula 3 at the Grand Prix?
I’m a regular four-day grandstand guy, along with some mates, and with just a couple of Australians taking part, just in F3, we and most of the people around us, just couldn’t get into either of them. It turns out that F2/F3 are those ‘time to go get a drink / queue for the toilets’ kind of thing.
If we’re stuck with having them for contract reasons, then how about putting them early or late on the programme. Our main Australian category, Supercars, has obviously been shafted as part of the process, and Carrera Cup was running around at 6pm, long after most people had gone for the day.
It was a worthwhile exercise to give it a try, but my guys, and I reckon most Aussies, would rather have an Australian supporting show at the GP
Nate Gibson
Keysborough, VIC
THE GRAND Prix events proved it. For shorter races (less than a tank of fuel), Supercars is a much, much better show without pit stops.
Fuel and tyre stops are fine for long distance, but for sprint-style events they just destroy any ontrack battles that are evolving.
That’s the perfect format for the GP – four 20-lap, or slightly more, races. Action all the way, and nonartificial.
Steve Lapierre Chatswood, NSW
Publisher’s Note: Don’t reckon you’re alone there, Steve ...
SOCIAL DISCOURSE
OUR READERS HAVE GOT PLENTY TO COMMENT ON AFTER GRAND PRIX WEEK!
WATERS HEADING
STATESIDE FOR NASCAR TRUCK DEBUT
Mary Summers
And slowly they start to realise there’s a lot more elsewhere…..
SUPERCARS AT THE GP
Anthiony J Bugge
A SECOND SUPERCARS EVENT, AT THE GRAND PRIX?
MELBOURNE 500 SEASON STARTER?
The Australian Grand Prix will be the first race of the 2025 Formula One World Championship season and this is causing some headaches for Supercars Australia and its ‘25 calendar. Here’s one possible solution. Why not create a Melbourne 500 Supercars event at the Albert Park circuit in February, two weeks before the GP, that could be the opener for the Supercars Championship?
A Melbourne 500 could use the same temporary infrastructure, including the grandstands and corporate facilities, that are used for the GP. It could also use the same food and beveridge outlets as the GP.
For a Melbourne 500 the Supercars would be the main show and the teams could use the same pit garage facilities that the F1 teams use and the event could have similar support acts to what the Adelaide 500 has.
If there was a Melbourne 500 two weeks before the GP it could attract an even higher attendance than the Adelaide 500. Not only would it be a great economic boost for Victoria, it could generate millions of dollars to help offset the cost to stage the GP.
Some people will think it is way too soon to stage both a Melbourne 500 and the GP in a close timeframe, but the majority of fans who attend the GP don’t follow the Supercars. Those people who prefer the Supercars would attend a Melbourne 500.
Malcolm Webster
Boronia, Victoria
Publisher’s note: I don’t like the chances of getting up a second event at Albert Park. Perhaps a Supercars enduro could be worked into the GP weekend somehow?
Time we scrapped pit stops. Look how good the F1 GP weekend was. All out fast racing ...
Daniel Scicluna
Look, not gonna lie, from a driving standards perspective and from the teams just wanting a clean round, it was average at best. Lot of cars were banged up after the races major and minor. From a fan standpoint though, it was heaps entertaining and the short sharp formats encouraged audacious passes and aggressive driving
Matt Seckold
You’re allowed to position your car on the track to hold your position. You’re not allowed to punt someone simply because they’re in front of you. Absolute worst take I’ve seen so far...
SAINZ WINS
Tiago Rodriguez
Not bad for someone that’s about to lose his job at the end of the year to make way for a whiny SJW for “marketing reasons”.
DANNY RIC
Colin O’Brien
Honestly, he did 1 min 16.7 but was penalised for crossing a line, technically taking a longer path. That time repeated gets him in the top 10 on grid and if he holds that position with three cars ahead of him DNF he finishes seventh and everyone is back slapping saying well done. Give the Dan bashing a rest and see how the year ends up.
ALONSO PENALTY – FAIR?
John Bowe
How ridiculous is that! I’m appalled by that decision! Wolf and Russell are serial whingers I’m afraid. Alonso is a fair and hard racer. The following driver should be keeping his senses alert!
Just saying ...
AutoActionMag
AutoActionMag
THE STAR performer at Albert Park in 2024 was not on the track.
It was not a driver, or a team boss, or even the supporting cast from Supercars.
For me, it was Network Ten.
What’s that, I hear you say?
Yes, it was the Ten team who did the better job on the Australian Grand Prix, better even than the ‘experts’ from Sky Sports in the UK who are beamed into Australia for every round of the Formula One title fight.
Why Ten? And how Ten?
As a 26-year veteran of Albert Park, the television became my very best friend in 2024 as personal circumstances kept me at home.
I was looking for the best coverage and, against the odds, I found it on Ten.
Yes, there were far too many cross-promotional pieces, and the advertising became tedious and repetitive, and I had no idea
who most of the people were, but . . .
The coverage was fresh and youthful. The Ten crew looked like they were having fun at a special event, not over-analysing from just another stop on an endless trail of races.
Instead of reporting from ‘inside’ the GP, using a crew of long-haul veterans, the Ten team were looking from the outside perspective as newbies.
They asked new and interesting questions. They got the drivers to say some surprising things, including Oscar Piastri revealing his motorsport nickname was ‘Bruce’.
In some ways it was like watching ’The Project’ on wheels.
They started run out of puff by race day, when some of their set-piece interviews were being recycled, but they never gave up.
The Ten crew was packed with the network’s young regulars, but the motorsport expertise came from Damon Hill, Tom Clarkson and play-by-play caller Richard Craill.
And they also snagged the sweary man, Guenther Steiner. Hill can be drab and dour on Foxtel, but he was lively and happy and humorous on Ten. If only he was like this when
he is turns up on a late-night broadcast from the other side of the world.
Clarkson, who handles the official F1 interview sessions at each GP as well as his excellent Beyond the Grid podcast, was smart and insightful. He has plenty of insider stories, and he asks very good questions, and his pukka British accent added a little gravitas to proceedings. Craillsy? He was a superstar. His work as the play-by-play caller through the weekend was just plain outstanding. He gets plenty of second-tier time as a supporting race caller for Supercars, but he did a great job on the F1 telecast with a pacy and informed call, showed generosity and understanding with his fellow commentators, and knew when to turn the excitement up to 11. The Ten coverage also included some great interviews, including one with Max Verstappen and
Sergio Perez where mighty Max reflected on his success run through his four world championship seasonsbecause 2024 is already a slam dunk.
Verstappen knows people think his domination is boring, but he also knows about working his way into a winning position with Red Bull.
“For me it’s not boring. I know the other side of the sport,” he said.
“For me, I’m just enjoying the moment and trying to get the best out of myself and the car to win as much as I can. Once you have that package, why should I feel sorry about people being slower than us?
“I have zero empathy with anyone.”
And that, as a bottom line, was worth tuning to Ten for and explains why I score them at an eight for the AGP, with Foxtel behind on a seven ...
MAX VERSTAPPEN remains the key element in the 2025 drivers’ market, in spite of being under contract with Red Bull until the end of 2028.
With the relationship between the threetimes World Champion and Christian Horner on pretty shaky ground, two other teams are carefully monitoring the Dutchman’s moves and, while Mercedes has been widely mentioned as Verstappen’s most likely destination should he opt to leave Red Bull, a new contender has emerged in recent days.
The fact that Jos Verstappen, who manages his son’s career, together with Raymond Vermeulen, called for Horner to resign at the height of the sexting scandal that embroils the Team Principal, just days before Max Verstappen made it clear he’d be ready to leave Red Bull if Helmut Marko was to be sidelined, strained the relationship to the maximum.
While it’s clear that Verstappen’s best chance to win the 2025 championship
is by staying with his current team, his management is also looking at the future, fearing Red Bull’s own Power Unit won’t be good enough to compete at the front from the start of 2026. With both Ferrari seats taken until the end of 2026, Mercedes and Honda-powered teams have become the most interesting alternatives for Verstappen’s management if they can find a way out of Max’s Red Bull contract.
Jos Verstappen speaking publicly with Toto Wolff in Bahrain – after more than two years of giving the cold shoulder to each other – was the manager’s way of showing he’s looking for an alternative for his son –but in a more discrete way, talks with Aston Martin are believed to already be under way. The fact Verstappen still races with Honda designed and developed Power Units, to great success, have convinced the Dutchman’s camp that the Japanese manufacturer will be able to come up with a tremendously competitive package for the new regulations as well.
With Aston Martin now having the most modern Formula 1 factory, and months away from having the most modern wind tunnel as well, a move to the Silverstone-based team in 2025 would allow Verstappen to get to know the team next year and be an important element in the definition of the 2026-spec chassis, bringing the knowledge he’s acquired at Red Bull, where the development of future cars revolves around his own driving preferences.
Until recently, Lawrence Stroll’s dilemma was to decide if he’d give Fernando Alonso a new contract for one or two years or, alternatively, hire Carlos Sainz to lead his team onto the next set of regulations.
WITH MERCEDES having its least competitive weekend in many months, compounded by the double retirement of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, the pressure is mounting for changes to be made, as this is now the third straight season the German team has failed to deliver.
But, with Verstappen seemingly available, only a fool would fail to try and hire him immediately. But, like Toto Wolff at Mercedes, Stroll first has to wait to see how the Verstappen-Horner war ends before making his decision about what driver he wants to sign to lead his team from 2025.
Even Toto Wolff’s leadership is now being openly questioned by some experienced observers, but the Austrian insisted, after the end of the Melbourne race, that he’s still the best man to do the job.
Wolff explained that “as a co-owner of this business, I need to make sure that my contribution is positive and creative. I would be the first one to say, ‘If somebody has a better idea, tell me, because I’m interested to turn this team around as quickly as possible’. I’ll happily give my input and see what that would be, who that could be.”
The Austrian then went on to insist his team’s problem is not the people running it, but a lack of understanding of what makes a car competitive in this new of regulations:
“We have a physics problem and not a philosophical or organisational problem, because we haven’t swallowed a dumping since 2021. It’s just that we don’t understand some of the behaviours of the car – that in the past we would have always understood.”
Wolff admitted he questions himself constantly, before explaining he doesn’t see a possible exit for himself:
“I look at myself in the mirror every single day about everything I do. And if I believed that I should ask the manager question or the trainer question, I think it’s a fair question, but it’s not what I feel at the moment that I should do. But if you have any ideas who could turn this around, I’ll happily listen to that.”
The Austrian then explained, in conclusion, that his role as shareholder doesn’t allow him to throw the towel in;
“The big difference is, it’s not the manager question in terms of ‘this is my job and I will stop the job if somebody else is doing the job better’. I haven’t got that choice, which is also unfortunate. I’m not a contractor or employee that says ‘I’ve had enough of this’. My hamster wheel keeps spinning and I can’t jump out.”
Finally, in a very Austrian way, he explained how both he and Lewis Hamilton have managed to stay calm in the face of such a bad start to the season:
“As an Austrian, we very much wear our heart on our sleeve and we see things very direct. An Austrian says ‘that’s really shit;’ a British person would says ‘that’s interesting’. So, I had to adapt the way I communicate, in order to not create even more pressure in the team because it would break us. It’s not because of a lack of trying that we are not competitive. So, I’d rather be helpful and encouraging and say ‘that’s interesting’…”
CARLOS SAINZ could make a sensational return to the Red Bull family next year, as the Spanish driver – suddenly in demand everywhere – now seems to be at the top of Christian Horner’s preference list for the seat alongside Max Verstappen.
The British team manager continues to insist that “I think it’s too early in the year to even be thinking about next year” and publicly defends Sérgio Pérez’s performances. But, behind closed doors, he has made it clear he believes Red Bull needs a top driver under contract to be protected against an eventual departure from Max Verstappen to Mercedes, as his personal relationship with the Dutch driver and, especially, his management, is now at an all-time low.
Asked at the end of the Australian Grand Prix if he would be happy to take Sainz back into the Red Bull fold, Horner admitted that “based on a performance like that, you couldn’t rule any possibility out.”
He then cautioned that, “we just want to take the time and, obviously, Checo was compromised today – he’s had a great start to the season too. So, we’re not in any desperate rush.”
Then, jokingly, Horner concluded that, “Carlos is the only driver that’s beaten Red Bull since the end of 2022, so he appears to be our nemesis!”
The negotiations with the Spanish driver are now the new battlefield between Horner and Marko, as the veteran Austrian doesn’t want Sainz back in the Red Bull
family and, in truth, never wanted him at any time. It was the personal relationship between Carlos Sainz Sr. and Dietrich Mateschitz that forced him to take Sainz into his Young Drivers’ Program, but now it’s Horner pushing to have the Spaniard in the team. For now, the Brit seems to have the upper hand over the Austrian side of the Formula 1 operation.
Horner did offer praise to Yuki Tsunoda, saying that “Yuki’s a very quick driver, we know that”, before essentially dismissing the possibility the young Japanese could be Pérez’s replacement, pointing, unprompted, to Carlos Sainz:
”We want to field the best pairing that we can at Red Bull Racing and sometimes you’ve got to look outside the pool as well. You’ve had a very fast unemployed driver win today’s race, so the market is reasonably fluid with certain drivers.”
As for Ricciardo, that has been one of the biggest disappointments of these early stages of the season. Horner – who forced his return to the Red Bull family against Marko’s wishes – admitted that, “he had a tough weekend. I haven’t really looked at his race but it looked like he had pretty similar pace to Yuki in the race. He had a tough day in qualifying given that lap was disallowed. So, we just want to give him a bit of encouragement.”
McLAREN MOVERS and shakers Zak
Brown and Andrea Stella have nothing but praise for young Oscar Piastri. Now in his second season with McLaren, the Australian sits one point ahead of team mate Lando Norris in the championship, with two fourth places, in Saudi Arabia and in his home race, helping the team to be in a solid third place in the championship, way behind Red Bull and Ferrari but far from any threat from Aston Martin or Mercedes.
Zak Brown, who was instrumental in getting Piastri out of his contract with Alpine 18 months ago, admits his young driver “continues to get faster and faster.” The American explained that, “what we’re seeing is he’s got his rookie stripes off now and that means on Fridays he gets on the pace right away. Plus, he doesn’t really make mistakes and he’s extremely fast. I think we have the closest driver pairing in the field and that’s exactly what you want as a team. I think they’re pushing each other, so they’re pushing the team and I’m very excited about our driver line-up for the foreseeable future.”
better race car that he’s sitting in, he’s definitely enjoying it.”
In conclusion, Brown stated that, “he’s already a mature young man, but you can definitely see, one year on, he’s got a higher level of confidence, because he knows what to expect.”
A more analytical man, due to his training as engineer, Team Principal Andrea Stella gave more details, pointing to the way Piastri controlled tyre graining on his car during the second stint, in spite of being forced to push hard on the first two laps on the Hard tyre, as proof the young Australian is already able to race like a veteran:
“In the final stint, where Lando and Oscar pitted prettu close together, they had pretty much the same pace. Compare that to what Oscar was capable of doing last year, even in Suzuka, where he finished third –we’ve gone a long way forward. And it’s extremely encouraging to think that this is only coming at the start of the second season. If you think how much he has to cash in more in terms of improvement … I think it looks very strong for the future from Oscar point of view.”
Nevertheless, Horner pointed out that Ricciardo, “is a big boy, he’ll pick himself up. But, sometimes, being a Formula 1 driver can be a bit lonely so a bit of encouragement’s never a bad thing.”
The McLaren CEO recalled that “last year we had a very difficult start because our car was not competitive. So, in addition to having the pressure of being a rookie and then coming to your first home race, Oscar was also in a race car that wasn’t that strong. He’s now got a year under his belt and he knows what to expect. He’s got a much
Strong words from the bosses, ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix where, based on last year’s evidence, McLaren hopes to be much closer to Red Bull and Ferrari than in the first three Grands Prix of this season.
SAUBER’S HEAD of Trackside Engineering Xevi Pujolar has admitted the team’s main issue won’t be fully solved in the next couple of races, as the timescale to produce the new wheelnuts for the C38 is too long for the new parts to be available for the Japanese and even the Chinese Grands Prix.
In Melbourne, Valtteri Bottas was running comfortably ahead of both Haas cars and on the tail of Alonso’s Aston Martin when he pitted early to defend from an attempted undercut from Magnussen. Even if the team had prepared for relatively slow pit stops, the mechanics taking as many precautions as possible to make the contact of the new wheel guns with the new wheel-nuts perfect, what happened was that the left front wheel-nut got cross-threaded, the Finn losing 30 seconds in the pits and, with it, any chance of scoring points.
Later in the race, team mate Zhou Guanyu also lost 20s in the pits, but Pujolar explained “that happened because we were managing a small gearbox issue at the time and that caused the engine to stall, so there was nothing wrong with the wheel changes this time.”
As luck would have it, the only wheelnut issue the team had in four stops in Melbourne affected the faster car, when Bottas on was course for what would have been a potential P9, robbing the Swiss team of precious points. A frustrated Bottas said at the end of the race that, “it doesn’t matter what you have as a car and how well you drive if this issue isn’t solved.”
Unfortunatelly for the Finn and the rest
of the team, the solution is not around the corner, as Pujolar admitted: From the first race, we found some issues with the pitstops, with cross-thread wheel nuts. When we do free practice or even during the winter, we didn’t find a problem but then every time we go into a race situation, it becomes more critical. We took some containment [steps] with this week some small modifications, but it’s not robust enough and we had one pitstop issue in Melbourne too.”
A new design has been approved and production of the new wheel-nuts have already started – they’re produced by an external supplier, as it’s the case with the majority of Formula 1 teams’ wheelnuts – but, together with the new front hubs, the the metallurgical processes required to manufacture them is quite time consuming – in some cases the new bits have to mature up to four weeks before they can be worked on, so the team’s focus for Suzuka is on finding
more counter-measures for the current issues, while waiting for the new parts to be ready, at best for Miami, but more realistically only in time for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, six weeks from now.
Pujolar also explained that the team is “unable to revert to parts used last year, because they are not compatible with the completely revised 2024 front suspension – so what we had in last year’s car simply wouldn’t fit on the new chassis.”
AUDI’S DECISION to takeover 100 per cent control of the Sauber Group is a clear declaration of intent from the German manufacturer, putting the Swiss team on par with Ferrari as the only squad to be fully owned by a car manufacturer.
Mercedes only controls 33 per cent of the team racing under its name; Aston Martin’s control is majorly with Lawrence Stroll but the Canadian has a number of partners investing with him; and Alpine has diluted its shareholding of its team by selling important chunks of it to a number of investment groups.
After months and months of speculation surrounding Audi’s commitment to the Formula 1 program, the decision to go beyond what was the initial deal with Finn Rausing – the initial deal would see Audi control 75 per cent of the shares of the Sauber Group from the start of 2025 – proves there are no doubts at Audi about the importance of this program.
Audi has now gained full ownership and control of its F1 team. Images: MOTORSPORT IMAGES
What was more surprising was to see the Swedish millionnaire agreeing to get out of Formula 1, as he had made it clear to Audi and the team management that he intended to keep a minority stake in Sauber, remaining a director of the Board for the long haul. Although numbers
haven’t been made public, it’s believed Rausing was able to get a much better deal for the 25 per cent shares of the team he was still going to control than he did for the 75 per cent control of the shares agreed 18 months ago.
Under the new deal, that is effective immediately, Audi has full control of the racing team and the technology department of the Sauber Group and has already
concluded a complete analysis of what kind of investment is needed immediately and in which departments there’s the pressing need to add more manpower.
That had been Andreas Seidl first task – to identify in which areas the team would need human and finantial investment – but, while the German engineer was supposed to have three years to put everything in place, that deadline has been brought forward by 18 months. By the end of June, everything should be in place or, at least, have the necessary money committed to it.
Audi’s hand was a little bit forced by the persistent rumours that a rival company continued to fuel in the German financial press, popping up every two or three months, about Audi pulling out before even coming into Formula 1 – so now the speculation is over.
The other benefit for the Swiss-based team is that, now there are no doubts Audi will be in Formula 1 for the long haul, it will be easier to attract top quality engineers to Hinwill, something that was previously only the case during the four seasons in which the team was under BMW’s management, between 2006 and 2009.
FERRARI’S DOUBLE win in Melbourne was not a fluke. Yes, Verstappen’s brake issues helped Sainz seize the lead early on and took the Dutchman out of the way for Leclerc to claim second; and yes, Pérez’s recovery was hampered by a tear-off from Alonso’s helmet getting stuck on the underside of his car, but the Mexican was already 20s behind Sainz when his RB20 lost aero efficiency and was lapping a couple of tenths off Sainz’s pace at the time.
There’s no doubt Ferrari has started the season with a much better car than last year’s SF-23 ever was. Similarly, it’s clear the race team is also much more effective that it was this time last year.
Also obvious is that, now, the Scuderia gets to FP1 much closer to the ideal set-up than in previous seasons, meaning the way the weekend is prepared in the simulator is much more accurate than in the past.
And since last year’s Dutch
with Luis VasconcelosGrand Prix, it has been also clear that every new part that is put in the car brings lap time gains, showing the team has a near perfect understanding of what makes its chassis work.
The man behind this quick transformation is Team Principal Frédéric Vasseur. If you’re not a great racing fan and you see him in civvies, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to believe the man in front of you is a quiet, gentle farmer, not very ambitious and not particularly smart either!
But if you believe looks can be deceiving, then Vasseur is your best case study. The Frenchman is one of the smartest people I’ve ever come across in my many years in the Formula 1 paddock,
but he certainly does his best to hide his talent behind a nonchalant front.
Ask him a question in public and, inevitably, Vasseur comes up with a funny comment, laughs a lot about it, luring the audience to laugh with him, before giving a well thought-out answer that removes any doubt you might have had, as you’re likely to have forgotten there was a follow up question that now Vasseur has cleverly avoided. See how well he has worked in convincing top people to join Ferrari, people you’d swear would end their careers in their current teams. Who lured Lewis Hamilton out of Mercedes? Vasseur, who has been a friend for nearly 20 years and quietly worked to get the most
successful Formula 1 driver of all times out of a team that gave him six titles! And he did it without Toto Wolff, one of the most intelligent men in the paddock, and one of the Frenchman’s closest friends, finding it out until 24 hours before the deal was announced!
Then there’s Loic Serra, leaving Mercedes in the next six months to join Ferrari, as will Red Bull’s Pierre Wache, who won’t be staying much longer than that with the most successful team of the moment and will be the Scuderia’s future Chief Technical Officer.
There are other big names coming from Mercedes and Red Bull, I’m reliably told, so Vasseur’s ability to turn the team around while handpicking great talent is amazing.
One final example of his understanding of how a team must work came recently, when Simone Resta decided he’d had enough of Gene Haas’ team and returned to the Scuderia. Instead of placing him in the current F1 technical structure, Vasseur put
him on the WEC program, for two reasons: one, he couldn’t see a suitable place for Resta in the current structure and knew that whatever the Italian could add will be added by people he has already hired and will arrive in Maranello in the next year and a half.
Second, by putting such a highly paid engineer ‘in the market’, he knew it was just a matter of time before another Formula 1 team would hire him, lowering the Scuderia’s salary sheet and freeing money to hire new talent.
As Mercedes just did.
Don’t be fooled by the looks. Vasseur is one of the most effective Team Principals Ferrari has had in its history, with the advantage of having come through the ranks and understanding how every area of a team should work. He’s cultivated friendships with key motor sports people and is living proof that you don’t have to be nasty or unpleasant to be successful at the top level of Formula 1.
IN DECEMBER 2022 ANDREA STELLA TOOK OVER AS TEAM PRINCIPAL AT MCLAREN. THE NEW CAR FOR 2023 WAS MILES OFF THE PACE. NOW IT IS FIGHTING TO BE THE SECOND FASTEST IN F1 – AND OSCAR PIASTRI IS A BENEFICIARY. HE SAT DOWN WITH ANDREW CLARKE AT THE AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX …
ANDREA STELLA has been a revelation since moving into the top seat at McLaren at roughly the same time as Oscar Piastri. The 2023, car which hit the track last March, was born before his time, but the car that jumped ahead by leaps and bounds was all him … well not all him, but all his responsibility.
When we first spoke with him at the McLaren launch last season, we felt there was something special about him. He was measured in every word that he said, clearly analysing every question that was asked of him, trying not to build hope with the answer but inspiring confidence when he spoke.
In Piastri it seemed like he had found a soulmate. The young Australian is equally as measured and seemingly unflappable. He doesn’t jump on the radio to complain about who did what – he just focuses on his task and the outcomes he can affect. Like scoring points at his first Australian Grand Prix.
The 53-year-old Italian is a qualified aerospace engineer and was promoted from within at McLaren to replace the Andreas Seidl as Team Principal in December 2022. It was clear at that stage, according to reports at the time by CEO Zak Brown, that the new car had missed the mark, and the restructured team had some work in front of it.
A modern frontline F1 team has a staff of nearly 1000 people and an army of boffins, engineers and aerodynamicists all pushing to unlock the next design trick to take McLaren further up the grid. Stella is, for the wont of a better term, their leader.
“Even at the leadership level in a Formula One team it is teamwork. When I think about my leadership as team principal, I immediately see it in a broad sense that my collaboration with Zak is very close, very tight. I think we integrate with each other very well but then if I think how I actually work on a daily basis, I lean on the chief operating officer, Piers Thynne, and on the chief people officer, Daniel Gallo.
“The pace of the business is incomparable to anything else. Recently, I met some people, because I meet all the new starters, and some were from automotive industry, some from aeronautical industry and I said, okay what is the difference? And they said that the pace of the business and
When I talk about expectation, most of the time I refer to things that have a numerical reference, which is the expected ... “ ”
development is three, four times faster than anything they had seen.
“It’s complex because you need to have the pace, you need to have the reliability and you need to have the performance and you need to make sure that you don’t take the wrong route of development. This is complex at a technical level and it’s complex at the people level. You need the teamwork even on the leadership side.
“I’m definitely happy with the development that we have been able to achieve from a car performance point of view, but also from the development as a team that has a vision, has a culture. You always look forward and you always try to get the most out of the 800 people so that we can be as competitive as possible.
“When we talk about development, I think we need to consider that there’s two parallel work streams. One is an underlying development, which is almost independent of the issues you have with the car. As long
as the car does what you expect, especially from an aerodynamic point of view, you can progress.
“There’s working in the background to constantly add downforce and trying to reduce drag, and this happens as, I would say, as a main work stream. Which is why Formula One cars gets faster and faster through the season. For instance, last year we cut one second compared to the start of the season.
“Then there is a parallel work stream, which is let’s look at the issues and problem areas in which the car doesn’t do what we expect, and then you might have to take some specific actions which have to do with correcting these issues.”
Expectation is an interesting thing in F1, as perhaps one of the most scientific
and data driven activities on the globe. We would suggest that not even Boeing understands the flow of air like an F1 team. When he talks expectations, he’s talking about decades of modelling and sensors all over the surface of the cars to learn more about what is happening. Computers give some probable answers, then data gives the facts.
“When I talk about expectation, most of the time I refer to things that have a numerical reference, which is the expected – for instance, the level of aerodynamic load. You can plot in your telemetry charts and this is the expected
coefficient of downforce, and then you compare these with the measured downforce based either on the load cells that you have on the pull rod or push rods or other pressure sensors on the car.
“And based on these pressures measured, you reconstruct the load acting on the car, and then you compare this with the expected value that comes from the wind tunnel. Right – so, for any given condition around the lab, you compare the two. It’s always good news when the two match up.
“Sometimes you find anomalies. For
instance, you may see that track-side, in a low-speed corner, you don’t get the behaviour that you expect from the wind tunnel. You also have to be a bit careful because wind tunnels don’t simulate the lowspeed corner conditions very well.
“So here we go into some more complicated engineering, in terms of tracking whether the car does what you expect from an aerodynamic point of view, and whether that’s a normal discrepancy in the measurement or is a proper anomaly that you should tackle from a ‘I need to understand why things here don’t go as expected’.
“In a similar way, you have an expectation also from a mechanical point of view – like suspension travel and all these kinds of things. The complicated one is tyres, which is still little bit of a black art, I would say …
“From a tyre point of view are we using the tyres in the race better than competitors? Worse than competitors? You get some information, for instance, from Pirelli. At the end of every day you get a report that says this is your wear, this is the wear of your competitors’ average. You have some indirect information on your competitors – but how
you analyse how you use your tyres uses expertise that is not necessarily kind-of expected quantitative data.
“It is informed and expert guesswork – if that makes sense.”
Last year in Bahrain for the opening round, McLaren started the season with mechanical dramas in the first race, but there was little speed. Lando Norris qualified 11th and Piastri was 18th, before Norris finished two laps off the lead and Piastri didn’t finish after his car had electrical issues.
In the next round it was Piastri in ninth on the grid and Norris was 19th – admittedly, Norris did hit the wall so his low qualifying was not the team’s responsibility. They both finished the race, but in 15th and 17th respectively.
They didn’t quite limp through the opening rounds, but it was close. Up to Round 6 at Monaco, Norris had only qualified once inside the top 10, as had Piastri. But for Spain, McLaren rolled out a major upgrade, albeit for Norris only … and he qualified third. By the time the first set of upgrades had settled on both cars, McLaren was competitive and fighting for second among the teams.
The development program and upgrades are effectively planned at the start of the year, which means spending inside the mandated expenditure cap is under control.
“The main limitation to car development, at least for McLaren and for our business model, is actually not the cap because we allocate at the start of the year a certain amount of budget to build parts that are part of car development. You know, the famous ‘upgrades’.
“From a financial point of view, this certainly wasn’t a limitation last year. We don’t plan this to be a limitation this year. The main limitation is actually to understand what upgrades you need to do and to create the geometries for instance when it comes to car shapes that maximise the aerodynamic efficiency. Or from a suspension point of view, the suspension layout that maximises the interaction with the tyres. It’s much more a knowledge and expertise limitation rather than a financial limitation.”
The upgrades come in different forms. There are the major upgrades – like Spain/ Austria last year – which take a lot of planning and manufacturing, through to minor upgrades which could go from idea to reality quickly.
“In aerodynamics, you may understand that there’s potential in developing a certain area but, normally, this requires weeks of development where you do loops with your computer simulations and wind tunnel up to the point where you have reached a maturity for this geometry to be released and then it goes to the car. But normally, from the moment you conceive an idea to when it lands trackside, it could be a work of three or four months.
“And I think, in a similar way, when you do some fundamental work on suspension layout, it could be again a matter of months. There’s some things instead that you can do within weeks, especially when you see some things don’t go exactly as expected.
“But sometimes this is an easy thing to adjust. And this could be something that, for instance, we spotted in the Bahrain test, and we can have an adjustment for Race 1 within a week. So dependent on what area of the car, the time scale can vary from a few days to a few months.
“Like if you take last year, we introduced a development in Austria and then the other
OSCAR IS not just fast – he’s calm and measured. When McLaren first tested him on a simulator it knew it had to have him in its car. He was quick and the information he was able to share proved he understood the intricacies of the cars and how to extract speed.
The Stella and Piastri combination, from the outside, looks like a perfect union.
“I’ve said several times that these personal qualities of being calm – or that he just seems very self-aware. I think he keeps his nerves well under control. This is a quality of a person that supports his role as the driver because, as a driver, you naturally will have a tendency to get a little excited.
“That’s a good thing because it keeps you in condition to get the most out of your ability. There’s no noise in your head; there’s no interference with executing the task and the ability that you are here for, which in this case is driving.
“But also driving in the midst of other competitors. And I think this staying calm, this staying self-aware is certainly … I don’t know how much it is a natural gift or is something that he actively works on, but it definitely makes a difference.”
When I talk about expectation, most of the time I refer to things that have a numerical reference, which is the expected ... “
development in Singapore and that’s pretty much – from Austria to Singapore – the kind of time it takes to generate an upgrade.”
He said McLaren had a good hit rate recently with its upgrades, but that it doesn’t always correlate like that. The 2024 car has also behaved as expected.
“Over time, you improve your tools in terms of aerodynamic simulations in the wind tunnel. The tools become better and better. A better representation of the car on track and therefore the car on track tends to match the expectation more and more. But if we go back over the years, to actually get the correlation was a real headache and could still be a headache.
“If you look last year at Aston Martin; they spent a few races trying to understand if their upgrades were better than the baseline car. And, in fairness, this could happen to us as well because in some areas it’s very difficult to reproduce what happens, especially around, for instance, the front tyres or the rear tyres.
“Tyres are very non-aerodynamic objects and it’s quite difficult still to simulate the behaviour. And sometimes the tools don’t get this behaviour 100% right. We have had a good hit rate recently, but we are very aware that this aspect, which is normally referred to as correlation between research and development, is a key one in which
we need to invest to get an effective development of the car.”
So, step one is understanding your own car. Step two is understanding others and what you can learn off them. Like all the F1 teams, McLaren has photographers who feed them still images of the other cars on the track, and the engineers and aerodynamicists digest the images postrace looking for trends and ideas.
Then there’s the bonus of Monaco, when Sergio Perez stopped on track and his car was lifted in the air by a crane, and Red Bull Racing’s most intimate secrets were on display.
“That was good. If they want to do it again, we are happy to take a look! In fairness it’s not like you say, ‘okay I will copy that’ and it works. This game is more complex than that, but it can give you indications as to maybe the concept they are trying to achieve. But ultimately, if you want to go from point A to B, you need to go there by your own means, if that makes sense.
“Sometimes it’s like reassurance – ‘Oh, B is the right place to be because I’ve seen it in the car when it was on the crane’. But how to get there … you need to know how to do that. There’s no easy game just because you see a photo or copy the geometry – it doesn’t work like this.”
Formula One in terms of the racing battle
is as one-sided as it has ever been. The dominance of Max Verstappen in race trim is, frankly, making all the other teams look like they are racing in F2 cars, but, the battle for second is brilliantly hot. Ferrari has started 2024 as the second best, and McLaren along with Mercedes and Aston Marton has the Scuderia in its sights.
“Ferrari seems to now be the second-best team. They’ve done a good job over the winter in developing their car. And they seem to be having a few tenths of a second advantage on us if we take Bahrain and Saudi. We hope that, through the upgrades, we will be able to fill this gap and challenge Ferrari for being the second-best team.
“I think to get to Red Bull, it will take months of work. And I can see realistically in the best scenario this being an objective that will be potentially 2025.
“We are competitive. And it’s interesting that you are competitive, first of all, against what you can achieve with what you have available. The main objective on which we are focused is what can we achieve now? What is the next step? And work towards it.
“Then you think about the next step after that – it just doesn’t make sense to think about step three when you need to go to one, to two, and then we go to three. That’s how it really happens in the real life of a Formula One team. You can have an ambition and, certainly, some of your investments for the foundation of the team have to take into account what is your ambition? Do we want to win?
“For instance, we said, yes, we want to win. So we need a new wind tunnel, a new simulator, a new composite manufacturing facility, a new machine shop. And that’s the investments that we started some time ago. But right now, there’s no magic that will lead us to be as quick as Red Bull. We will have to be a little quicker than now, then quicker than Ferrari, and then at some stage we can start chasing Red Bull …
“We know that it’s a game of constant development. I’m happy that over the last 12 months McLaren is definitely the car that has developed the most. In a way we out-developed competitors and we need to keep out-developing our competitors. That’s ultimately what we are focused on. We don’t look very much at the others. We look more at our own rate of development.”
THE BEST athletes are nearly always in a happy place. A place with belief in them, a place where they feel like their team has their back. A team that feels like it offers support when times are tough, as much it celebrates the good times.
Whether the complete lack of the support was there or not, Nick Percat felt it was missing in 2023 at Walkinshaw Andretti United, the second year of his dream return to the squad that took him to a rookie Bathurst with Garth Tander in 2011.
Having controversially walked out on Brad Jones Racing to join the Clayton squad, he did so full of hope. WAU was on the rise, Mostert’s 2021 Bathurst win was one of the most dominant of the Supercars era, and its meandering woes of the past looked behind it. It was as sharp as any squad in pitlane. It finished fourth in the Teams Championship that season with little input from the #2 car in terms of points.
Percat was brought in to fix that, but didn’t. He finished 15th in the Championship in that first year and then bottomed out with 20th in 2023.
Aside from a second place in the Adelaide 500 in 2022, they were two years from hell for
the South Australian. The move did not work. He regularly qualified down the back and only had three top 10 finishes in 2023.
He was offered a one-year deal, for 2024, but Matt Stone came calling and he was compelling, and Percat – who had never lost his self-belief, despite the results – listened.
“I didn’t doubt my abilities because I had good people around me. Chaz always had my back and to his credit, he was one that pushed me hard to make sure I got in the MSR car,” he said. “When you’ve got a competitor who’s also a good friend saying those things, it does reassure you.
“The only reason I wouldn’t have kept going or the only reason there was a doubt, is that it
was just draining. If you’re inside a team that’s not going well or they’re not backing you in and the belief isn’t there, that’s a big issue. There wasn’t a lot of faith.
“And the little things you see, it’s hard to not see. Comments on social media and stuff like that even after the weekend, the comment I made about not being happy, people just read that headline. But the people who saw the interview saw a guy just telling the truth and everyone wants to hear us drivers tell the truth more and speak our mind, that was not a loaded gun. That was just raw emotion, it was overwhelming.
“There’s never a moment in my life where I wasn’t grateful for the opportunity to drive
there alongside Chaz but it just didn’t work. It was not a fun time. Any athlete or in any business or work environment, you always obviously want to put your best foot forward and get good results, whatever that might be.
“If you are happy being in the top 10 and that’s what gives you satisfaction, that’s good. But for me, I’ve always won races and been at the front in every category. I’ve had an interesting Supercar career but there’s always been podiums and wins. When it’s not going that way and you’re not at the level you expect, it’s not fun.”
At the start of the WAU era, he was struggling with single lap speed but was racing well. His first race with the team saw
If you’re inside a team that’s not going well or they’re not backing you in and the belief isn’t there, that’s a big issue ...
an eight-spot gain in the race for a sixthplace finish with Mostert on the podium. There were double digit gains, 11 spots at Symmons Plains, 10 in Perth, 12 at Winton and 13 at Townsville. Over the course of the season, he averaged a three-spot gain from the grid to the race, with only Tim Slade giving a better gain.
But it came off the back of a qualifying average of 16.7! He qualified inside the top 10 only seven times out of 34 races.
It was rough year as WAU backed its way out of the Gen2 era and into Mustangs for 2023. Hope faded fast – the Mustang was fighting from behind and Percat fell to rock bottom. He had the same qualifying average – 16.7 – for the season, but his finishing average was now 17.1 and he dropped to 20th in the championship with a best of fourth and only two other finishes in the top 10.
“When you look back, I think my first race with the team, Chaz was third and I was sixth and that was the first time in many years they had two cars in the top six. So, it started great.
“It went south quickly when my engineer got sacked, in a way that probably wasn’t ideal, and I'd loved having Geoff on my car. From there it was a change of engineers every third event.
“It’s no different if the team doesn’t think you have the ability and then if the driver isn’t confident in the way the car’s being put
together, it is never going to work. And that’s probably one issue for me. I’m very hands-on. That’s why I have a karting team, I physically work on all these kids’ karts and pride myself on no mechanical failures.
“When you have that understanding of how a car works, and there’s trouble in your race car, it’s easy to see how it’s been put together. I think I had 18 mechanical failures in one season from the mechanics not putting it in there properly.
“It just didn’t work out, did it? It’s just how it is. I guess.”
There were lowlights during his time at WAU where both cars struggled, which he feels have been swept away, like the time when he and Mostert were the two slowest qualifying cars in Perth. He says, rather obviously, that there was something wrong with the cars that weekend from the time they left the workshop.
“That was a funny weekend for me and Chaz, duking it out, door-to-door for the last spot.
“It felt like every weekend my car was having steering rack issues, but that was luck of the draw; that wasn’t anyone’s fault. We would get a brand-new steering rack and put it in and it would fail. And that was just how the Gen3 thing unfolded. I was probably just the one who got blamed for it, but to be honest, there were underlying issues.”
He felt there was a lack of support from the
2023 wasn't a great year for Percat at WAU (below). Images: PETER
team, and that it was looking ahead. Ryan Wood was emerging and perhaps not quite yet ready, and Percat was offered another season but nothing more as Walkinshaw wanted to give its young Kiwi prodigy another season learning. He wasn’t happy with that and put his hat in the ring, and Matt Strone came knocking.
“When we spoke, there was never a doubt from him,” he said of his first meeting’s with Stone. “It was, ‘We want you to drive the car. We think you’re fast and I think we can get good results together.’ He never doubted me.
“The big thing was when I arrived, it was, ‘we just want you to go fast and go well’. And it’s been pretty easy, to be honest.”
What he found when he walked through the door was a team built by racers with the goal of winning races. Gen3 has worked well for the team, which won its first race last year and now has its second.
“It’s just a totally different environment. My karting team kids have been hanging around the pits this year. Sometimes the parents didn’t want their kids near the WAU garage but now, at MSR, you can’t get them out of it.
“That probably says more than I could ever say.
“On the weekend we had a few things in our car that needed to be fixed and guess who’s fixed it? Matt Stone. It’s a lot different style – Matt and all the engineers and Pete Vale and everyone’s on the ground working as hard as the mechanics, so I think that’s the big difference.
“No one disappears early and goes off and does anything else. The team arrives together, and they all leave together. It’s just a team of full-blown racers.”
After two tough years, winning the final race in Melbourne was his own “To whom it may concern” moment to copy Valtteri Bottas. The first wave of relief and excitement dissipated fast when he realised he was going to run out of fuel on the in-lap. He got a bit of a push but had to run the last part and didn’t get his car lined up with the #1 stand.
“There are so many people that backed it in, so it was cool to reward them early in the year.
“I’ve been quiet. I don’t say a whole lot, even last year. And then there’s been a few people that I’ve spoken with this year where I made a cheeky comment, like, ‘I can win this year.’ And they looked at me like I’m an idiot. And now I’ve had messages from those people going, ‘Yeah, okay, fair play’.
“Some people do think I’m an idiot, but I just enjoy racing cars. It’s nice when they’re fast and doing the things you want. It lets you enjoy it.
“If you look at it now, we haven’t been outside the top 10 all year. We’re fourth in the championship. We’ve won a race. It’s like we’re not just accidentally there. Every race we’ve been there, and, on the weekend, I probably passed the most cars of anyone when I qualified out of position. It’s not like we only won it because Chaz accidentally bowled Payne too wide, I had the speed to win it with or without him doing that.
“I want to win more races. I know Matt wants to win more races. The goal will be more top fives, more podiums and if we can grab a few more race wins, amazing. Then you’ll probably just get to the end of the year and see where it shakes up.
“From my side there’s rebuilding the confidence and that will just be a snowball
THE CHAPARRAL 2J WAS THE MOST RADICAL OF ALL JIM HALL’S CAN-AM CARS. AFTER THE BANNING OF HIGH WINGS, THE IDEA FOR THE 2J STARTED FROM A KID’S DRAWING. IT WAS THE BIRTH OF ‘GROUND EFFECTS’ …
By WILL JEFFERIESJIM HALL created the weirdest and wildest sports racing cars. If not the father of aerodynamics, he was certainly the black art’s early maestro.
Hall was Adrian Newey long before Adrian Newey. A man who seemingly could see air.
Unlike Newey in Formula One over the past 30 or so years, Hall’s Chaparral sports cars, while inevitably fast, were unreliable and rarely victorious.
The last of them, the 2J, never won. Its best finish from its few starts was a sixth. Yet the 2J is regarded as Hall’s most brilliant creation - and it was to have an enormous long-term impact in motor racing.
Enzo Ferrari reckoned that horsepower was everything and that aerodynamics were for those who couldn’t build decent engines.
Hall, now almost 90, and Newey have proven how integral aero is to generating speed, particularly in cornering.
Hall came from a rich Texas oil family.
His parents and his sister died in a plane crash when he was at university, originally studying geology but later mechanical engineering. While his two brothers went in other directions with their inheritances, Jim Hall immersed himself in his Chaparral projects.
He’d done a bit of racing, including in F1, as some rich American boys did in the day, but design was to prove his forte.
Hall and a fellow Texan racer, Hap Sharp, bought a business from Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes that they had commissioned to
build the original Chaparral, named after a Texan bird dubbed the roadrunner. Hall, primarily, and Sharp, to a much lesser extent, then built and raced a succession of gleaming white Chaparrals that became the 2 Series.
Hall pioneered fins, spoilers and high, suspension-mounted, adjustable aerofoils on the Chaparrals in the CanadianAmerican Challenge Cup, or Can-Am series, through the mid-1960s. F1 followed his lead, but by the end of the decade the big wings had been outlawed, after the
another early adventurer in aerodynamics – crashed massively at the Spanish Grand Prix on the streets of Barcelona.
Hall then found a completely new way of generating downforce, without the penalty of extra drag that had come with the high wings.
For the 1970 Can-Am he rolled out the 2J, which was to become known as 'The Sucker Car.'
It was conventional enough at the front, but behind the driver the 7.6-litre
We felt that this system was much more effective than the wing we introduced in 1966 because it worked at all racing speeds ... “ ”
Chevrolet engine, Hall’s three-speed automatic transmission and the bulbous rear tyres were encased in what was basically a square box. It had no wheel arches. Also in that ‘box’ was a twin-cylinder Rockwell snowmobile engine and there were two suction fans from a Howitzer military weapon at the back.
On three sides of the ‘box’ were skirts made of Lexan, a new, light, malleable, strong, even unbreakable, polycarbonate plastic from General Electric and trickily connected to the suspension to keep them close to the ground all the time.
Technical writer Karl Ludbigsen explained the vital fourth seal at the front of the
suction area under the 2J (below the cockpit dashboard). “There was a transverse row of a dozen (much smaller) Lexan plaques,” he said. “Each of the plaques comprised an individual system, with a plastic hinge to the body. Each was backed up by two more Lexan plaques, which were hinged to it in such a way as to harness both spring and vacuum force to keep its trailing edge firmly against the pavement.”
The snowmobile engine was mounted above the gearbox and sucked all the air from under the car, creating a low-pressure area. The 2J was literally sucked to the ground.
It meant the car could corner phenomenally fast – seven per cent faster than that year’s M8Ds of McLaren, the team that dominated the Can-Am at that time.
“We can go full throttle without wheelspin or uncontrollable oversteer,” Hall said.
“You can’t imagine the car can stop as fast or corner as hard as this one does.”
The 2J had made a late start to the season, but even then it was premature. The concept hadn’t been fully tested, but General Motors’ research and development unit at Chevrolet, which quietly – but hugely – backed Hall’s projects, wanted it on-track quickly in a show of one-upmanship.
Hall brought in reigning F1 world champion Jackie Stewart for the 2J’s first race at Watkins Glen in New York State. He was amazed how well Stewart adapted to the radical machine, but the ear-splitting Rockwell engine failed and the brake fluid boiled.
The Chaparral skipped the next three rounds and when it returned it had Vic Elford in the cockpit. There were still gremlins, but by the time of what was to be its final outing, at Riverside in California,
ENGINE: Chevrolet aluminum big-block 465-cubic-inch (7,620cc) V8
HORSEPOWER: 680hp (507Kw) at 7,000 rpm
CARBURETION: Chaparral crossover manifoldå with Lucas fuel injection
TRANSMISSION: 3-speed Chaparral “automatic”
BODYWORK: Fibreglass front bodywork; aluminum and fibreglass composite rear bodywork
COOLING: Front-mounted radiator; oil cooler mounted behind radiator
AERODYNAMICS: Rockwell two-stroke two-cylinder 55hp (41kw) engine driving two 17-inch (43.18 mm) axial-flow fans; articulated skirts made of 0.09 inch (2.3mm) polycarbonate sheets to seal undercar pressure area; radiator tunnel at front and adjustable rear flap to help balance downforce on body
CHASSIS: Aluminum semi-monocoque with engine cantilevered from rear bulkhead
WHEELS: Chaparral spoked single-piece cast magnesium; 15-inch diameter with six-bolt mounting.
TYRES: Front 13.9 x 15, rear 17.0 x 15, Firestone.
BRAKES: 12-inch (305mm) ventilated discs, Airheart calipers.
SUSPENSION: Front: tubular double wishbones with coil-over shock absorbers, anti-roll bar; Rear: anti-squat twin trailing arms, reverse lower A-arms, single top links, coil-over shock absorbers, anti-roll bar
DIMENSIONS: Wheelbase: 95-inch (2413 mm); Overall length: 145 inches (368.3 mm); Overall width: 78 inches (1981mm); Front track: 60 inches (152 4 mm); Rear Track: 55 inches (1397 mm) Static Ground Clearance: 4 inches (100mm)
AVERAGE WEIGHT: 2,030 pounds (921 kg), dry
THE 'OTHER' 2-SERIES CHAPARRALS – THE CARS THAT PRECEDED THE MIGHTY 2J ...
2A – The first of the Chaparral 2-series was designed and built to compete in the United States Road Racing Championship. First raced in late 1963, it was later developed into a highly competitive Can-Am car in the mid-60s. It was also a winner in endurance races
only 924kg, it also ran at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but withdrew after 111 laps.
– Chaparral
2E – Start of a revolution, this model introduced a large, adjustable wing on stilts mounted on the suspension, while the radiators were moved back to be ducted pods either side of the cockpit. Its only win was at Laguna Seca in the 1966 Can-Am, but it remains Jim Hall's favourite car.
2H – Extremely radical, but initially without the high wing that had become characteristic of the Chaparrals, this was the most troublesome of the 2J's predecessors. John Surtees was brought in to drive it but complained that, among many faults, he couldn't see out of it properly!
‘Quick Vic’ qualified it a whole 2.2 seconds clear of Denny Hulme’s McLaren.
“Coming in to the long, fast, 180-degree turn nine I was behind Denny, close to flat, and I just drove around the outside of him,” Elford said.
“He was so pissed off he pulled into the pits and sulked. A wonderful car!
drivers were angered that the 2J’s fans spat out all the stones, dirt, dust and grass it had ‘hoovered’ up. At the end of 1970 the 2J was banned on the basis that its spinning fans and its skirts were “moveable aerodynamic devices”.
It was then left to Porsche and Roger Penske to end McLaren’s dominance with their turbocharged 917, which ‘killed’ the Can-Am as a sports car series.
A decade ago Hall reflected at length in America’s Racer publication on those times, especially with the 2J:
“I recognised the value of producing and managing negative vertical aero force on cars in early 1964 and we used that principle on all our (Chaparral) cars to good advantage afterward,” Hall said.
“Our winged cars, the 2E, 2G, 2F, were probably our most innovative designs, but when those (adjustable) wing systems were outlawed after poor copies on F1 cars had failures we had to think of a different way to apply aerodynamic forces without them.
I recognised the value of producing and managing negative vertical aero force on cars in early 1964
“As soon as the snowmobile engine started the car sucked itself down about two inches. The amazing thing was that the fans were making the downforce, regardless of the car’s speed, so it worked just as well in a slow corner as the fast ones.”
Stewart had found the 2J “extraordinary, almost unbelievable, with remarkably good adhesion and very easy to drive. The car’s traction, its ability to brake and go deeply into corners was something I’d never experienced.”
Hall said: “We felt that this system was much more effective than the wing we introduced in 1966 because it worked at all racing speeds. It even worked at the slowest speed, where the wing was only effective at very high speeds.”
Hulme had feared the 2J from the outset. “When I saw that thing squat down I knew we were in deep shit,” he said. Forces gathered against the Chaparral during the season, particularly McLaren team boss Teddy Mayer. Trailing rival
”A kid sent me a drawing of a car that looked like a beanie cap – those little caps kids used to wear with a propeller on top. It had four wheels, with the driver peering out through a window of the beanie and the propeller on top. We looked at it and thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be a good way to do it?’ It wasn’t my original idea – somebody did send that to me.
“We got to studying it and thinking about it in terms of a hovercraft with negative pressure. We looked at the power requirements, the skirts it would need to seal the car to the ground, and it appeared that it was a real do-able thing.
“It was a joint project. Chevrolet got involved with us in it and did some of the initial test work. GE got involved. The chassis was built; the engines were mounted. It was a normal car in some ways, and not very normal in others.
“The hardest part about it was that it was like having two cars, but in one space. You had all the systems that we’d typically used on the Can-Am cars - the engine drivetrain, brakes, cooling, fluid and controllers, all that stuff. And then, in addition to that, you had a set of skirts that had to be maintained, and another little auxiliary engine to run with another fuel system, and so forth. It was certainly a complex car to work on.
“General Motors thought we’d have a hard time keeping stuff under wraps … that if we didn’t go run it someone else might jump in and race the concept before us.
“Initially we didn’t have adequate brakes on it, and we had some skirt issues. The skirts were actually a system where they were tied into the suspension travel with great big push-pull cables. When the
suspension moved and the chassis went up and down the skirts went up and down too, meaning they maintained a more or less constant gap to the pavement to maintain the vacuum. That didn’t work 100 per cent, but it worked pretty good.
Overall, the car just wasn’t ready.
“I can’t deny the 2J was pretty aggressive.
“It was a bit of a surprise to me that they
(the Sports Car Club of America) ended up banning it (after having earlier approved it).
“We’d made a commitment to do it, and we spent a lot of money, time, effort and hard work and didn’t get to win a race with it.
“The potential of that car was so great.
“The main thing was to make it reliable – we could improve the performance by
being more accurate with the skirts, by putting a little more power into the vacuum system. We certainly could’ve gotten some weight out of it. And I think it would have been spectacular.
“But if you’re going to corner 50 per cent faster (than Can-Am cars had previously) that’s going to make for a hell of an accident. So maybe the tracks and safety equipment weren’t ready to handle such a thing.”
Disappointed at the turn of events, Hall retreated from racing.
“My standpoint is that if I can come up with a better mousetrap I ought to be allowed to use it,” he said.
Hall’s ground effects concept took root in F1 later in the ‘70s via Lotus and Gordon Murray adapted a Brabham to run with a fan and it won the 1978 Swedish GP. However, Bernie Ecclestone, then the owner of Brabham, immediately shelved that car to keep peace in F1.
Hall eventually returned to racing with a 2K open-wheeler, winning the 1980 Indianapolis 500 and an Indy championship with Johnny Rutherford driving.
Hall was still on the Indy scene when that series came to Australia, fielding the car – a Lola – in which John Andretti won the first Gold Coast Indy in 1991.
These days, Hall still has all his priceless Chaparrals at a museum beside his Rattlesnake Raceway test track near Midland, Texas, where they do occasional demonstrations.
The 2J is far from the prettiest of the collection, but it certainly remains the most captivating …
FOR NEARLY 30 years, the Eureka Garages & Sheds Series has been the premier series for Sprintcars in Victoria, and Bobby Daly is the latest driver to add his name to the winner’s list.
On his eighth attempt Daly (above) enjoyed a season of highs to become the 2023/24 season Eureka Series Champion.
“To be able to take out the Eureka Series is a huge honour and a great reward for all of the efforts from the team and I have put in throughout the season,” expressed the 29-year-old who finished second behind Corey McCullagh in 2019-20.
“Heading into the season, the team and I didn’t set out to chase the Eureka Series, as the plan was to get to the Christmas-New Year period and then go from there, so when we had taken control of the Eureka Series lead by that time our goal shifted to trying to wrap
up the series, and that’s exactly what we managed to do.”
In the season finale itself, Jamie Veal stormed to an early lead with Jock Goodyer and Brock Hallett slotting into his slipstream.
After an early caution for Jamie Heyen, Goodyer attacked Veal and snatched a lead he did not let go despite a series of late cautions, including one for Hallett, who was third until his left rear exploded with just five laps left.
An 11th place finished proved to be enough to secure the title for Daly, who said his season highlight was his first 410 Sprintcar feature race victory during the ninth round at Portland’s Southern 500 Speedway earlier this year.
Other strong performances from Daly’s Eureka Series campaign were third at Heartland Raceway and then a pair of top-five finishes at rounds 7 and 11 at
Simpson Speedway and Avalon Raceway, plus top-10 finishes in Max’s Race and the Victorian Title at Simpson Speedway.
So…when it comes to Daly and the team’s plans for the 2024-25 season? “I’m not too sure what the plans are for next season, but we will be back out there again,” he replied.
“At the moment, the focus is to just enjoy our successful season, and then we will get back into the shed to work on the car during the off season and work out a plan from there.”
Daniel Powell
FINAL EUREKA GARAGES & SHEDS
SERIES POINT STANDINGS:
1 Bobby Daly (Vic) - 2966 points
2 Terry Rankin (Vic) - 2543
3 Parker Scott (SA) - 2225
4 Daniel Pestka (SA) - 2127
5 Tate Frost (Tas) - 2070
THE LISMORE City Sprintcar Smackdown at Castrol Lismore Speedway may have been brought to a premature end due to the wet weather, but prior to that, the ontrack action was thick and fast.
In the third appearance of the 410 Sprintcars at Castrol Lismore Speedway this season, crowd favourite visitor Luke Oldfield, who had earlier this season won the Lil Aussie Open at the venue, and fellow Queenslander Cody Maroske were the form drivers.
For the qualifying heat races for the 410 Sprintcars, the wins were shared between Oldfield, Maroske, Harry Stewart and Bradi Owen. Prior to the heat races, Oldfield and Maroske topped the time sheets in qualifying groups before the washed out feature.
The Pro Sprints (360 Sprintcars) action saw Dan Murray and youngster Kye Jensen as the highest point scorers heading into their feature race.
The heat race wins were shared between
Noah Ball, Kye Jensen, Luke Manttan and Dan Murray.
In what was their final appearance at Castrol Lismore Speedway before next month’s Australian Championship, there was a solid field of Wingless Sprints in action.
The heat races went to Andrew Seery, Mark Blyton, Jason Bates, Ian O’Toole, local Jacob Jolley and Ben Manson.
The B main was picked up by Errol Campbell, while the highest point scorer heading into the feature race was Seery.
CALLUM WILLIAMSON (above) has claimed the win in round 15 of the Maddington Toyota Sprintcar Series at Perth Motorplex.
However most of the race was dominated by the series points leader Dayne Kingshott in the Krikke Motorsport #2 – who started from second alongside Jason Pryde.
The feature race got off to a rough start, with contact between Jason Kendrick and Aaron Chircop in the early stages, bringing out the red flag.
This set the tone, as the race saw several more stoppages for multiple incidents that ended the races for Brad Maiolo, Ken Sartori, Shaun Bradford, Ryan Lancaster and JayDee Dack before the halfway mark.
Maiolo clashed with Jarrin Bielby, putting the latter out as Kendrick had nowhere to go and tagged Maioloand in the process he knocked out his brake calipers, with both cars on the infield for the rest of the show.
Sartori spun around on the main straight, while a handful of laps later Dack spun to the infield after contact with Jamie Maiolo, as the same time as Shaun Bradford slid to the infield, but was able to get a restart.
Lancaster was the next driver to activate the red lights after a moment with Kaiden Manders, and he was nearly hit by Taylor Milling as well.
On lap 18, Kingshott was working his way through lapped traffic when the #39 of Jarrin Bielby spun coming out of Turn 2, causing Kingshott to take evasive action where he spun himself and was sent to the rear of the field.
Williamson, who started fourth, led from the restart and never looked back for the last 12 laps of green flag racing, bringing home a popular win.
Coyle secured second after winning an earlier battle with Jason Pryde, who spent much of the race in the top three but ultimately fell all the way to seventh.
Kingshott fought hard upon his relegation to the rear of the field, clawing his way back to fifth by the end, ahead of defending MTSS champion and cloest rival James Inglis – inching away his lead by just 42 points with 3 rounds remaining.
Chris Mitchell
Daniel Powell
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RACING MADE a long awaited return to Sydney International Speedway on March 23 and Jy Corbet (pictured) was the first Sprintcar driver back in victory lane.
Having not hosted racing since April 2023, a big crowd found their seats at the returning NSW venue to watch Sprintcars, Late Models and Fender Benders go racing around the revised layout.
The Sprintcars were the stars of the show and a strong 30-car field arrived for reopening night.
Former Australian champion Jock Goodyer was one of the biggest names and he opened his account with a heat win, as did Kobi Wright and Jordyn Brazier.
Goodyer carried on his form to take out the opening Dash, while eventual winner Corbet showed some ominous pace by
storming to Dash 2 victory.
With the threat of drizzly rain, the race started as soon as possible and Jordyn Brazier got the holeshot and built a solid advantage over Goodyer, only for it to be wiped out by an instant yellow when Jeff Lawler and Alex Attard tangled on the exit of Turn 1.
Corbet started ninth but started to pick off his rivals with ease.
Goodyer was a safe second but his race came to a sudden stop. Whilst the attention was on Jake Baines, who rolled at Turn 3, Goodyer pulled up right next to the damaged car, taking evasive action.
But it turned out the former Australian champion who had shown plenty of promise in the Saller Motorsports #N56 was also about to retire.
The muffler came loose, forcing Goodyer into an early retirement.
Brazier was still in charge and led the restart with Corbet now in third.
But it did not take long for the speed of the #NQ10 to prove irresistible and Corbet stormed to the lead.
He flew home to complete the charge to victory and win on Sprintcar racing’s return to Sydney International Speedway.
Brazier also ended up losing second, to the fast-finishing Ryan Newton.
“It was good,” Corbet told Codeman.
“Qualifying was pretty solid running against the fence and confidence levels were pretty high.
“Once we got rolling in the Dash I knew we could get going.
“I had to be patient with those guys in the
A Main coming from so far back and there were a number of incidents.
“Stoked to get a win for the team because they put in so much effort.”
It was fortunate the Sprintcar race took place because unfortunately not all feature races could be staged.
The 17-car field of NSW Late Models contested four heats, won by Mark Letham, Lachlan Onley, Daniel Cassidy and Ryan French, but the A Main was washed out.
It was the same fate for the Fender Benders as well.
However, it was still a successful return and fans will only have to wait another month before Sydney International Speedway welcomes back Sprintcars on Saturday, April 20.
Thomas Miles
KAIDEN MANDERS (pictured) has claimed his fourth WA Speedcar Championship crown and third in a row.
California export Logan Seavey started from pole, but it was Manders, who stormed away from the start, building an early lead ahead of Seavey and Tom Payet.
A hearty battle with Manders and Seavey emerged until lap 15, where Manders began to rally the #71 around the outside to the win.
Seavey consolidated a 2nd place result while Payet battled with Daniel Harding for the majority of the race to finish 3rd
IN THE WA WINGLESS TITLE
THE 2024 WA Wingless Title was one to remember for the Iwanow family who brought about a 1-2.
Blake and Matt Iwanow started on the front row of the 25 Lap Wingless Sprint
feature race, after they both won all of their heats and preliminary finals, leaving them tied on points coming into the finale.
Defending and three-time back-to-back WA champion, Matt Iwanow said it was ‘just another race’ – but his brother Blake proved too strong.
A powerhouse performance saw Blake Iwanow slip away at every restart to take a commanding win by almost four seconds and secure his maiden WA Title after he stood on the podium on the last two occasions.
Matt Iwanow was left to contest for the remaining places, battling for the majority of the race with Travis Armstrong, Brendon Wedge and Bailey Nash.
Wedge succumbed to a mechanical failure which took him out of the race with just two laps to go, allowing Iwanow to race home second ahead of Nash on the podium.
KYE BLIGHT blitzed the field in the WA Late Model title feature race to claim his second title with the Paul Stubber-owned BAR31 car. He had to come from seventh on the grid to do so, as Jason Oldfield led away the pack from pole, joined by brothers Warren and Jamie at the front of the field Jason Oldfield struggled in the early stages, dropping back through the field and allowing American Doug Drown to stretch
Images: RICHARD HATHAWAY PHOTOGRAPHY
out a large margin leading the race.
Two subsequent caution periods in the first 10 laps closed the field up, allowing Blight to move forward quickly and, by lap 13, he had found a way past Drown to lead the rest of the race home.
Drown held on for second with a very comfortable margin ahead of Warren Oldfield in third – who battled brother Jason in the closing stages of the race after an earlier incident with Joe Chalmers causing significant bodywork damage to the #11. Chris Mitchell
FELICITY ROYCROFT pulled off a huge comeback from disaster to be crowned the Queen of the Murray in the Ladies Sports Sedans event at Wahgunyah Speedway.
Roycroft’s night had a tough start by breaking a clutch and a gear box in the first heat race of her night.
This meant she had to go through the third-round heat to qualify and start the feature from the rear of the grid. However, this did not stop her from going all the way.
chequered flag 0.488s ahead of Watts, Brockley, Joosten and Sgroi.
Starting on the front row of the grid alongside Scott Purdie, Degoldi was initially shuffled back to third by a fast-starting Shaun Henry in the 40-lap feature.
But Degoldi and Purdie muscled their way past Henry, setting up a race-long battle.
Degoldi stalked Purdie for the first half of the race before finding his way past, but a determined Purdie stayed on the leader’s tail through to the finish.
The two cars eventually crossed the finish line just 0.8s apart with Henry in third.
For Degoldi, it was a great way to rebound after a broken driveshaft and differential in his Ford Falcon forced him out of the Street Stock National Title at Hamilton the previous weekend.
“The King of the Mountain is always one of the events I most look forward to, so to take another win is fantastic and a great way to bounce back after last weekend,” Degoldi said.
“Full credit to both Scott and Shaun –they both raced hard but clean, and it’s fun racing against drivers who show that sort of respect for each other.”
Purdie, having his first outing in a brand-new VF Commodore, was thrilled with the performance of his car in its competition debut.
“To be honest, I’m surprised at how well the car performed in its first event, but it’s a credit to our team for how well they’ve built it,” Purdie said.
Another story of redemption was that of Tim Reidy, who won the AMCA Victorian title after an accident eliminated from last weekend’s National Title in Moama.
Reidy led every lap of the feature race; he faced pressure in the opening laps from rapid Tasmanian Adrian Bassett, but Bassett’s challenge ended when he crashed out on lap five.
Some lapped traffic in the closing stages enabled Queenslander Steve Price to make bold lunge on Reidy at the last corner; in the end, Reidy held out Price by just 0.08s.
“There was a lot of work to do on the car after the damage we sustained last weekend, so this is a sensational result for the whole team,” Reidy said.
“I love racing here at Redline Raceway and I’ve enjoyed some great success here in the past, but this is one of the sweetest victories.”
Third place went to another Queenslander, Matt Hardy, whose team was faced with the challenge of some rapid repair work after he was involved in a crash during the evening’s seventh heat.
The final category on the program was the Wingless Sprints, which made their return to Redline Raceway after an absence of several years.
After a strong run in the heat races (including a win in Heat 4), Peter Logue started on pole position and led every lap of the final, but was kept honest by Mick Rigby and Brayden McKay all the way to the chequered flag; the three cars were separated by less than a second at the finish.
“It was close racing all night, just how I enjoy it!” Logue said.
“Mick and Brayden drove really well and I couldn’t afford to make a single mistake with them both so close behind me.”
The next event at Redline Raceway will be held on April 13, featuring Standard Saloons, Street Stocks, Compact Speedcars and Unlimited Sedans.
Tay Barnard also displayed strong speed in the heats to start from pole and lead Zoey Salau.
But the pair started exchanging positions instantly which plated into the hands of Roycroft who was on the charge.
By lap five she was already up to fourth and on lap eight her job became slightly easier when Salau’s race came undone by contact with a slower moving car which fired her into the wall hard.
In the meantime Roycroft jumped Chelsea Hodge to snatch second as Barnard led the field.
Another caution arrived soon after when Tara Johannesen, Chloe Creek and Pauline Fell got tangled up.
Roycroft sensed her opportunity at the restart and flew into the the lead spot the next time around before lap by lap putting more distance between herself and others.
She cruised to a 6s win over Barnard and Hodge.
The Goulburn Ovens Sedan Association members signed in to compete for the latest round of their ‘Blue Shed’ state series. Each driver competed in three of the six qualifiers with former state champion Justin Brockley claiming a crushing 10s win in heat one as the state champion Danny McCarten suffered a flat tyre. Mitch Watts was strong in claiming two heat wins, while McCarten bounced back to take a victory as did Marty Bassett.
In the 12 lap final Watts and Brockley were on the front row but neither of them could stop Bassett from hitting the lead in the first third of the race. Stuart Balins and Marcus Maclean’s race cars connected with Maclean sending them into the concrete wall and exiting the race.
With four laps to go Joosten was now fourth behind the leading group fronted by Bassett but only just under pressure from Watts, and Brockley.
But Bassett finished strongly, taking the
Cooper Lack and Taijan Ussher turned valuable laps in the Junior Speedway Sedans with the latter setting an eight-lap record for the class in the final of 3:38.474 on his way to a win.
THE LADIES with Sports Sedans had opportunities to race in VSC Sports Sedans, also against the blokes.
Bradin Claridge got the racing off to a strong start by beating Rhys Collins by less than a second. Collins then won the second heat race by only 0.179s after snatching the lead from Daryl Joosten on the final lap.
Andrew Dike was a winner in the third heart race before Bradin Claridge again came out in front in the fourth qualifier. Collins then went on to claim the win from Claridge in the 10-lap final.
Riley Balins was in second briefly before slipping back, as Joosten took third late in the piece.
Micheal Fleming–Robertson led Corowa’s registered drivers against Victorian champion Rhys Lansdown in the Standard Saloons.
However, Lansdown had the last laugh, dominating the 12-lap final by almost 6s ahead of Fleming-Robertson and Gary Evans.
Former Victorian champion Peter Cox was the number one driver nominated in the Unlimited Sedan field and wasted no time making that known to others when he sped to a 6s victory in the first heat race.
In the second heat race Cox almost broke the track record for six laps as Darryl Joliffe met the concrete wall.
Another big win in heat three for Cox set him up for the final.
The feature was disrupted early by Corey McDonald who hit the concrete wall front on.
But there were no dramas for Cox who went on to a comfortable win ahead of Peter Schmetzer and Billy O’Donoghue.
Dean Thompson
THE RACING at Nyora Raceway on March 16 gave motorsport fans some fast and furious competition to enjoy.
Leading the way was Pakenham man Damien Miller winning the Robert ‘Woggy’ Bickham Memorial for Sports Sedans, Nick Parker the Compact Speedcar aggregate event, Shannon Meakins taking out the Hot Rods aggregate event and Caroline Allen from Warragul winning the Ladies Standard Saloon ‘Pink Night’ feature.
Sports Sedan racers fought for the coveted Memorial Race at Nyora for ‘Woggy’ which is a highlight of the season.
The heat races went to Damien Miller, Simon Bent and Ray Gould with the latter only just defeating Shona Bent.
But then it was Miller time as he won each of the remaining heats.
In a salute to Bickham’s own race car number, 24 laps awaited the 15 drivers for the feature event. It proved to be a race of attrition with 11 of the 15 not seeing the
distance due to mechanical issues, tyre flats or other concerns, including Simon Bent the second top qualifier.
Miller claimed a third victory in the Memorial Race with Braiden Webster coming second and Troy Desmond-Veal joining them on the podium, while Gavan Dorain the only other finisher.
Compact Speedcars brought their fast and furious little rockets to Nyora for a Victorian Compact Speedcar Clubs points event.
Across four heat races Nick Parker who doubles as a Speedcar racer in the big brother class to the Compacts claimed a win in heat one.
Parker scorched around Nyora setting a new one lap record of 14.883s plus a new ten-lap race time record. Paull Hallett defeated his sister Tania in heat two as Parker clean swept the final qualifying races.
In a 20-lap feature Parker secured a perfect night by recording a lights to flag win.
Whilst Perry was a non-finisher, Parker went
on to defeat Paull.
The Ladies Standard Saloon drivers competed in the ‘Pink Night’ feature event raising awareness and support towards breast cancer.
One of the leading competitors of the season thus far has been Bree Walker and she started well in heat one.
Caroline Allen hit back in the second race before Katie Meyer continued the trend of the previous race’s runner-up taking the following heat.
In a big redemption victory for Allen she then went on to claim victory in a hotly contested feature race with Walker second and Meyer third.
With a looming Victorian state title in the next two weeks, entries in the Standard Saloon Open class were low with just a handful of starters. Aaron Cormack and Kacey Ingram from Warragul twice shared the three heat victories between them. Claiming victory in a short sprint for the final was Poowong’s
Owen Cecil with a margin of less than half a car between he and Ingram in second, with Bree Walker third and head of Luke King and Matthew Bronson rounding out the finishers.
The Modified Sedan event was dominated by Andrew Dike.
After not one but two heats, Dike went on to control the eight-lap final ahead of Smith and Jarred Hooper.
The Victoria Hot Rods also put on a show and Brendan Roberts started as a winner in heat one from Neil Sixtus and Tony Green.
Victorian champion Shannon Meakins then won the second heat race of the day with a win in front of Tony Greena and Andrew Kemp before also taking out the third and final heat.
Boosted by the success Meakins carried on to secure the feature race honours ahead of Roberts Sixtus and Kemp.
The next race meeting at Nyora Raceways is on Saturday, April 6. Dean Thompson
THERE WAS action aplenty during the Super Sedans Jack Childs Twin Feature Challenge at Toowoomba’s Hi-Tec Oils Speedway.
There was a big casualty as early as feature Race 1 with heat winner Hayden Brims having fuel pressure problems.
Darren Kane was the only other driver to win both his heats and from the restart he and JJ Hamilton went side-by-side through Turn 1.
Kane ended up getting the better run through Turns 3 and 4 with Sean Black driving around the outside of David Nichols and settling into third.
Black made some smart moves under traffic to sneak into second.
Kane was in complete control until just two laps to go when he pulled to the infield due to a crank angle sensor issue when he was three tenths of a second off the track record.
Hamilton took over the lead and kept Brims at bay to hang onto victory.
Kane was back for the second feature
where Brims took control off the start.
Black and McCosker had a tense tussle for third before Black took the opportunity to drive by on the inside Brims also.
Kane also was a man on a mission but could not stop Brims from winning the Super Sedan Twin Feature Challenge in memory of Jack Childs.
Kane finished second and Black was third and the only driver to make the podium twice on Saturday night.
In the Legend Cars Queensland Title, defending champion Matt Gordon started on
.the inside front row with current Australian Champion Robert Rawlings behind him.
With the ACT Champion Darren Snowden on the outside the front row, the front two rows stacked with stars in the 20-lap feature.
From the start Rieley Fisher went high and the defending champion was swamped and could not move forwarding the three-wide battle.
It did not last long however as Darren Snowden retired to the infield with a rear end failure.
Fisher hit the lead but was under pressure
from Rawlings and Gordon.
Although they closed the gap Fisher was crowned the Queensland Champion.
The V8 Dirt Modified Queensland Title didn’t disappoint with David Clark dominating the race and setting a new track record in the process (12.808).
Clark shared the front row with Victorian Steve Milthorpe while defending champion Kevin Britten started from fifth.
Seiton Young had the better of the start and led early through some early chaos which saw Dale Corbett go upside down amongst the melee.
Once there was an extended run of green flag racing, Clark closed the gap to Young. With nine to go and lapped cars spread across the whole track, Clark took his chance and hit the lead with a big look down the inside.
Clark then dropped back to the bottom to slow Young’s progress to win the Queensland Title with Milthorpe in third.
THE 2024 Australian Tarmac Rally season kicked off in the Victorian town of Maysville where former series champions Jason and Fiona Wright excelled.
Behind the wheel of a Nissan R35, Wright emerged victorious in the 220km journey around the winding roads and steep climb between Lake Mountain and Cumberland.
Out of the 72-car field, they would spearhead the charge for outright contention along with Paul Dowie, Nathan Reeves and Anthony Moss.
The withdrawal of Reeves saw Wright take control, leading Moss by just over a minute.
Dowie made his move on SS11, taking over second but Wright maintained his lead to win outright by 59s.
Mark Griffith/Neill Wooley and Scott Coppleman/Matt Van Rooye battled for Modern AWD 2008+ bragging rights.
Just 12s would cover the top three before Griffith went off-road on SS6, allowing Lewis to prevail.
Champions Paul Dowie and John Allen would continue where they left off, cruising to a comfortable 3:18.3 victory in Modern 2WD 2008+.
Anthony Moss dominated day one to lead Early Modern AWD 1986-07 before nearest rival Liam Howarth found some scenery on SS11.
As a result Moss would take the class by a
staggering 5:10.2.
Husband and wife team Paul and Claire Buccini were challenged early by Mark Balcombe and Ian Wheeler in Early Modern 2WD 1986-2007.
But once Balcombe’s Mazda exploded a diff spectacularly at the start line to SS4, nothing would stop Buccini from taking a big nine minute win.
After a hiatus from tarmac rallying, the colourful pairing of Mick Downey and Jarrod Akker resumed their friendly rivalry with long time sparring partners Mick and Daniel Bray in
Classic Super Rally Pre 1985. The duo would swap stage wins throughout, with Downey holding off Bray to take the win by just over a minute.
Michael and Lachlan Nordsvan proved to
be the last ones standing in Classic 19721985.
They hit the ground running before finding some resistance in the form of Peter Gluskie and Sam Winter until they had a mechanical failure.
This put Bruce Power and Russell Hannah in contention until they broke a drive shaft on start line.
Nordsvan would then be unchallenged in class honours.
Warwick and Chris Hope, Rob Oshlack and Neysa Ellison plus Stephen Jack Gould would all take the early lead on the opening stages before Oshlack found his stride and powered on in Rally Challenge.
Oshlack would take the class by 3:36.9 over Hope, with Gould a further 2:50.7 behind.
Ian Watson and Marc Lyall would have the Rally Sport contest all their own way from the start.
Watson would head into the final stages with a 3:58.2 lead before his Polo left the road on SS12. Consistency meant that Luana Garwood and Kel Handley would remain the only car in class and collect their first class victory together.
The crews now have a seven-week turnaround before descending on Lakes Entrance to tackle the 240km 18 stage Snowy River Sprint on May 4-5. Entry applications close April 26.
ADRIAN STRATFORD and Anthony Staltari in a newly built G4 spec Ford Fiesta took the win in the Border Oils and Batteries Mitta Mountain Rally, the opening round of the Victorian Championship in the Victorian high country. For Stratford the 2022 championship driver, it was a double victory of sorts, having crashed out heavily at this event last year, ending his title defence.
Looking to ‘drive to finish’ Stratford/ Staltari took a one minute lead at the end of the our stages of Heat 1. NSW crew
Redhead/Winwood-Smith (Lancer GSR) led early but settled in to second losing most of their margin on the fourth stage. Lee/Lethlean (Lancer Evo 9) were just five seconds away in third. With no repeated stages and no pace notes, tactics for Heat 2 would be a bit of guesswork and for Stratford/Staltari their decision to leave service park with a boot full of new rubber paid off. Tyre wear on the mountain roads was an issue for many. Fresh boots for the final stage allowed them to take four minutes out of Redhead/Winwood-Smith and more
than two minutes out of eventual second placed crew Lee/Lethlean. Fifth in Heat 2 but third overall was another NSW crew, O’Hagon/Moynihan in a Ford Escort after some blistering times in Heat 2.
The Victorian Club Rally Series (VCRS) was run alongside in a shortened version of the Rally. Joel Wald and Cathy Elliott (Datsun Stanza) took the top step a mere 52 seconds ahead of veteran crew Semmens/Parry (Nissan 200SX), 2 minutes to the better of Linaker/Thomas (Lancer Evo 7).
The attrition rate was high with nearly half the VRC field retiring. “Driving to finish” was not a bad idea at all! Round 2 is the Ada River Rally April 20 in the Powelltown area.
Alan Baker
The 2024 Targa Classica saw more than 100 classic cars and after the four-day journey from Torquay to Calder Park, Porsche emerged on top.
The 1958 Porsche 358 A driven by Brent Morrison and Chris Kerr overcame a Bugatti T35B that is almost a hundred years old.
Morrison and Kerr took out the Targa Classica title after compiling 1,754 points, 183 less than David Reidie and Simon van der Meent, who put in a spirited performance in their 1927 Bugatti.
Joining them in the top three was Greg and Barry Adshead in their 1968 Jaguar E Type, who were the only others to register less than 2000 points.
The overall podium were covered by the Classica class for cars pre 1976 whilst the first in Legend class for cars 1976 to present day was a 1990 Porsche 911 driven by Mathew Coleman and Scott Welsh, who were fourth overall.
The Targa Classica covered over 1000kms
and 70 stages across the four days inspired by Italy’s Grand Eventi through Victoria starting at Ballarat before experiencing the Great Ocean Road and Calder Park Raceway.
Despite emerging victorious, Morrison and Kerr eased into the event emerging sixth after the opening day when drivers went from
RACV Goldfields to Victoria Park in Ballarat.
Reidie and van der Meent started strong in the Bugatti but leading the way after Day 1 were Brent Carr and Jo Duncombe in the 1958 Chevrolet Corvette.
On Day 2, the field departed Ballarat to Halls Gap before heading venturing off to Warrnambool.
This is where the Bugatti snatched the lead from Carr and Duncombe with the top two the only ones to score less than 600 points in the journey.
But Morrison/Kerr were also on the move, climbing from sixth to third.
Day 3 saw the drivers take on the Great Ocean Road and stopping over at Torquay.
Whilst Reidie/van der Meent maintained their overall lead, Morrison/Kerr had the momentum heading into the final day by taking out Day 3 convincingly.
They won it with 494 points, 129 less than the Bugatti to setup a tight battle to the finish from Torquay to Melbourne’s Calder Park.
The sleek Porsche 356 A of Morrison and Kerr flew home, scoring 331 points, 285 less than Reidie/van der Meent to snatch the overall win.
Another Porsche, driven by Coleman and Welsh dominated the day, taking it out convincingly with just 294 points.
Thomas Miles
AS THE dust settles over the Nanango and Manumbar region, the Kickass Motorsport Australia Queensland Rally Championship kicked off in style for 2024.
A total of 30 competitors took on 120 competitive kilometres, and at the end if it all Dakar Rally competitor Glenn Brinkman (pictured) emerged victorious.
Brinkman’s time of 1:10:47 was a minute and a half clear of Ian Menzies/Robert McGowan in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 9 1-2.
A total of 20 crews made the finish of the eight-stage rally with 10 finding troublemost for mechanical reasons - along the way including reigning champions Ryan Williams and Brad Jones.
Menzies/McGowan set an early cracking pace of 12m04s for the 18.69km stage, with
Williams/Ryan Jones hot on their heels 5s off.
Not far behind them was Erik Johnsson/ Larisa Biggar, with a mere three seconds separating first to third.
Running Paradise three times gave the more experienced crews plenty of opportunity to ‘learn’ the stage, and that was reflected in the improvement in stage times over the subsequent two runs.
Next was an all-time favourite piece of shire road in the form of Western Branch Road. This 13.34 kilometre stretch of road saw the top tier competitors averaging speeds just above 110km/hr, with the fastest nine competitors finishing the stage in under eight minutes.
Festest by 15s was Williams, who was on the pace, but would be forced to withdraw just two stages later.
From there, competitors went over to complete two laps of roads in the Elgin Vale and Gallangowan state forests, ultimately finishing in the late afternoon at Manumbar Campdraft.
This is where Brinkman/Hughes made their move, winning the final two stages to power on to glory.
The second round of the Queensland Rally Championship is at Coffs Harbour on April 20.
Miles
the decisive blow on on lap eight.
LEADING THE way was the new era of the Australian Drivers Championship, which was fought by a busy field of Hyper Racer X1’s for the first time.
The stage was set for a competitive first chapter in qualifying where the top four of reigning champion Dean Crooke, Damon Sterling, Ricky Capo and Hayden Crossland were split by just four-tenths of a second.
Capo replaced F3 Champ Noah Sands who unfortunately withdrew from the weekend at the last minute for health reasons.
He pushed hard but fell just 0.007s short of Crooke in the fight for pole.
The cars dove into Race 1 three cars wide and when all was said and done it was Capo who took the historic win.
He was embroiled in a nail-biting battle, trading places with Crooke before making
Crook faded to fourth but Hayden Crossland put on a late charge and came within half a second of stealing the win from Capo.
Crooke responded emphatically in Race 2 where he led from lights to flag ahead of Capo and Damon Sterling.
The #88 returned to the top step in race 3 after stealing the lead from Crooke on the second lap.
Despite Capo controlling most of the race, only 1.5s converted the top three.
Capo completed the round win in style by taking out the finale ahead of Crooke and Bradley Smith.
Although the #88 was the dominant, the average gap between the top two across all four races was just 0.9s.
THE VICV8s saw Commodores and Falcons launch all four wheels over Mt Jane and it was Mark Kakouri, who initially carried the most speed.
He would win the first two races before suffering a snapped tailshaft in Race 3
ending his weekend. Brian Finn stepped up in Kakouri’s absence to win the final two races.
However, consistency was the name of the game and taking the outright honours and championship class win was Craig Eddy by just a single point ahead of Arthur Van Orsouw.
The Sportsman class was won by Mark Pesavento who now sits second overall in the sportsman class standings while Brian Finn was the runner up.
THE 2 Litre Sports Sedans and the Australian Pulsar Racing Association (APRA) ran a combined field for the weekend.
Lauren Talbot showed great pace in Friday practice before suffering a suspension issue which unfortunately wrote her out for the weekend as well.
This helped Steve Howard enjoy a clean sweep for the weekend in his Toyota Corolla KE 30, taking qualifying and all four race wins.
Linda Devlin still finished second despite suffering throttle position sensor issues on
Saturday and being forced to switch into her MINI JCW Cooper S’s sister car.
Rounding out the 2LSS Podium was the Nissan Bluebird of James Harris.
THE APRA podium was led by Matthew Butters whose stellar performance helped him secure a third outright result in the final race of the weekend, showing the Sports Sedans how it’s done. Lee Nuttall came home second overall with Declan Kirkham in third place.
THE VICTORIAN Super TT Championship saw David Buntin in his Lotus Elise and Ranald Maclurkin in his Aston Martin fight hard all weekend.
The two British sports cars were evenly matched but in the end it was Buntin who would take the win for the weekend.
Round 2 of the Victorian Motor Racing Championship is at Winton Motor Raceway on May 10-12 where the Australian Super Trucks, Australian Driver’s Championship, 2LSS, Victorian Super TT, Victorian Sports Cars and Hyundai Excel Racing Victoria categories will compete.
AARON WUILLEMIN has opened his 2024 account by taking his first win of the NSW Motorkhana Championship season.
After 19 competitors took on 12 tests across two days, Wuillemin emerged victorious comfortably in the third round run by the New England Sporting Car Club at Armidale.
Despite being his first win of the year, a third straight podium has helped the driver surge into the championship lead.
Despite the end result, Wuillemin had plenty of competition early on as he exchanged the opening two tests with Philip East.
Eventually Wuillemin stabilised his lead at the end of the day by winning three straight tests, but both East
and late bloomer Jackson Halloran remained in striking distance.
East then raced out of the blocks on Day 2 by taking out the first two tests, only for his pursuit to be ruined by a number of penalties.
Wuillemin then took the opportunity to confirm his victory with a number of test wins, while Collier jumped both Halloran and East to settle into second.
Third place was the leading woman Lauren EastWuillemin, just ahead of top junior Harrison EastWuillemin.
Round 4 of the NSW Motorkhana Championship will be hosted by the Hills District Car Club in Nirimba on April 21.
Thomas Miles
THE 2024 Queensland Circuit Racing Championship rolled into action at Morgan Park where seven popular categories put on a show, Thomas Miles reports…
HIGH VOLATILITY ensured the battle for the first Sports Sedans round honours of 2024 remained tense throughout.
Daniel Crompton’s Ford Mustang was lightening over one lap, but could only last three in the first race won by Timothy Tritton’s Honda Prelude.
Crompton was back to his best in Race 2 and flew to a commanding 21s win.
But in Race 3 the Mustang had a rival in the form of Grant Draney’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo, which prevailed by 6s.
In the end Crompton bounced back brilliantly ton win the final race and jump ahead of the tightly bunched Ward and Draney to steal the trophy.
THERE WAS drama straight away in Improved Production with many failing to finish the season opener.
There were six DNFs including the #1 of Paul Spiteri as Ashley Isarasena opened her successful weekend in style.
Isarasena cruised to a crushing 31s win over fellow Mazda RX-7 driver Geoff Kingston. However, she encountered more competition as the weekend transpired.
Isarasena prevailed again in Race 2 but the margin was cut down to only 5s.
After finishing second best, Troy Marinelli was on top in each of the final two races.
The third was a nail-biter as Isarasena pushed the Nissan 200sx all the way whilst the finale was a more commanding affair.
But due to a costly DNF in Race 1, Marinelli had to settle for second in round honours behind Isarasena.
REIGNING CHAMPION Joseph Andriske
kicked off his Holden HQ title defence perfectly by winning all four races.
The first was a thriller with less than a second splitting Andriske and Justin van Twest.
The #1 was able to extend the margin to 2s in Race 2 and fend off new challenger Brandon Madden in Race 3.
Andriske saved his most dominant performance for the final where Madden was only able to complete six of the 10 laps.
THE FIGHT for Formula Vee was also a onesided affair with the reigning champion also in a league of his own.
Alex MacDonald drove the #1 Jacer F2 into P1 in all four races, followed home by Michael Westerhout on each occasion.
The fight for third was more open with the likes of Oliver Seibel and Edward McFaul sharing stints before the latter prevailed.
THE 2024 South Eastern Automobile Club Motorkhana season fired up at the Glenburnie Saleyards recently.
Jason Sims set the pace in Test 1 ahead of Damien Wilson and Cohen Hamilton before Tony Wallis let the Special loose to come home 9s clear of the rest in the second attempt.
Test 2 looked a bit like the ABC logo and Sims started strong before Hamilton made it look easy on the second attempt in his Falcon.
Sims then went back to back at the following layout before collecting another success on the repeat of Test 4.
Hamilton was the only other driver to top a run amid Sims’ hot streak.
The next layout looked similar to a Multiple Loop and Wilson scored the fastest time by six-hundredths of a second ahead of Sims.
Daniel Crompton and his Ford Mustang was too fast in Sports Sedans.
Images: TRAPNELL CREATIONS
THE SPORTS and Racing and Formula Ford fields were combined and the honours for the respective classes were not decided until the final race.
For the majority of the weekend Formula Ford appeared destined to go to Kyle Evans.
Evans wrapped up the first three races but his pursuit of a four-peat lasted just three laps.
This left Tim Hamilton and Jeremy Mattea to fight for victory and Hamilton emerged on top.
Having finished second in each of the previous races, he did enough to also snatch the round win.
Sports and Racing was a much more competitive tussle.
Jamieson Davies opened his account with victory but dropped to third in the following two races which were won by Christopher Farrell.
However, Farrell failed to finish the first and
But then Sims hit back as he went on a run of taking out three straight tests.
The layout which resembled 4 x 4 cone boxes played into the hands of Wilson, who set the pace on both passes.
The final test was a four-loop pattern and it again drew out the best of Wilson as he went back to back to finish the day in style.
The last pass was a tense one as Wilson held off a big go from Sims.
Despite his fast finish claiming the final four passes, Wilson just fell short of the overall win.
Sims won with a total time of 12:27.46 to claim overall and Class D honours.
Wilson was 5s from the lead but still claimed Class C.
Juniors went to Henry Sims, Class E was won by Bradley Bliss and Junior Novice went to Dylan Bowering. sevoice.com.au
last sprints and victory in Race 3 propelled Grant Green above them all to steal the round.
A BIG field of 37 Hyundai Excels took on Morgan Park and Matthew Boylett bolted out of the gates.
Boylett won the first two races but his streak was broken by George Wood, who prevailed by the slim margin of just 0.29s. Boylett hit back to take out the penultimate race but their tussle continued all the way to the thrilling finale where Wood won again by half a second.
Despite the result, Boylett did enough to secure the round win.
THE #888 has done plenty of winning in Australia and this time Ramu Farrell did it in his Porsche 991.1 Cup car.
Farrell cruised to wins in all four Production Sports races.
Whilst the racing was one sided, the fight for second was the opposite.
Despite finishing no higher then third all weekend, Hugo Godson was second in the round points with Lachlan Harburg suffering a costly last race DNF.
The Queensland Circuit Racing Championship heads to “The Paperclip” at Queensland Raceway on April 19-21.
THE 2024 NT Motorkhana Championship opened at Hidden Valley Raceway on Friday 15 March where a number of competitors impressed.
The NT championship operates a little differently to others in that it has driver categories (Outright, Ladies and Junior) rather than vehicles and a total of 18 drivers took on the opening round despite some regulars being unavailable.
Using the carpark area at Hidden Valley, a mix of six courses were used, mostly from the motorkhana handbook but with a newfor-2024 custom designed course included as a great challenge to keep things fresh.
Points are awarded for each course with 30 to the driver with the fastest time in their respective category from the best of two attempts, decreasing by one point for each subsequent position and equal points in the event of a tie.
The fight for Outright honours went down to the wire with just five points splitting the top three.
With three course wins and 173 points, victory was secured by Mitchell Davis in his Toyota MR2 Spyder.
Davis overcame reigning NT champion Travis Humm, who was unable to win any courses in his Mazda MX5, but strong results meant he achieved 168 points and second for the event.
After being the 2023 championship runnerup, Aidan Hansen scored one course win and 167 points in his Chevron Clubman on his way to finishing third.
In the Ladies, Susan Byrne fell just one point short of a perfect round at 179 driving a Subaru Liberty.
Four points adrift was Sam Hansen in a Hyundai i30 and young Lydia Nixon driving a Toyota Corolla.
Of the Junior drivers, Lydia was pipped to third by her brother Josh who scored 169 points in the same Corolla.
In his first year moving to driving after spectating for some time, Alex Craig recorded 172 points for 2nd, narrowly being beaten by his older brother Ben with 176 points, both sharing a Hyundai Getz. Round Two of the championship will feature Star Wars themed courses under lights at Hidden Valley Raceway on Friday, April 5. Adam Cullen
THE 2024 BATHURST 6 HOUR HAD A HINT OF DEJA-VU AS JAYDEN OJEDA ONCE AGAIN PUT IN A LATE CHARGE TO VICTORY ALONGSIDE SIMON HODGES AND GEORGE MIEDECKE ...
FOR THE second year in a row Ojeda rose to the occasion in the final stint to secure back-to-back wins in the #1 BMW.
However, it was far from a sure thing with just 1.4s covering the podium finishers in what was the closest top three in the history of the race.
After six hours and 123 laps of racing, Ojeda took the chequered flag 1.2s ahead of Thomas Randle/Ben Kavich/ Matt Kavich, who were immediately followed by Will Davison/Beric Lynton/ Tim Leahey.
After the all-BMW podium, the leading A1 machine was a Volkswagen Golf R of Cem Yucel and Iain Salteri.
They were the last to finish on the lead lap with A2 winners Jason Aaron Seton/ Ben Gomersall fifth in the Ford Mustang.
A convincing B1 win was taken out by the all female team of Karlie Buccini/ Courtney Prince/Suzanne Palermo, whilst rounding out the top 15 overall finishers was C winner Pieter Faulkner/Matt Slavin in a Holden Astra.
A train of D Class cars was led by the Toyota 86 of Mitchell Wooler/Tim Barwick, whilst in 27th overall and first in E Class was the Mazda 3 of Scott Tidyman/Ben Shaw/Seth Gilmore.
FRIDAY
A 61-CAR field ventured to Mount Panorama to take on the Easter enduro and the heat was on as soon as Good Friday.
BMW made its intensions clear by filling the entire top eight in opening practice led by Tom McLennan/David Russell/Shane Smollen.
Whilst they topped the opening session by the comfortable margin of seven-tenths, Practice 2 was a lot closer.
After the morning’s first practice session ran without interruption, the afternoon track time was interrupted by two red flags.
In the lead up to Practice 2, the decision was made to combine the B1 and B2 classes, with only one Class B2 entry.
There was drama for Class C runners Steve McHugh, Ian Cowley, and Adam Talbert, who were forced to sit out the session undergoing an engine change.
On the track the session had hardly got
going before the Renault Megane of Jackson Rice ground to a halt on the out lap on the run up to The Cutting.
A second red flag was caused by Richard Shinkfield’s BMW M3 which stopped at Hell Corner.
Despite the breaks, the battle for fastest time honours was fierce.
Just 0.08s was the difference at the top of the table as a pair of Supercars drivers pushed the limits with Davison edging out Randle.
It set the scene for a fascinating fight for pole
SATURDAY
BEFORE QUALIFYING drivers had to negotiate a third and final practice session where there was one unfortunate casualty.
After 35 years of racing, Colin Osborne was hanging up the helmet after the 2024 Bathurst 6 Hour.
But sadly he and father-son co-drivers Rick and Zach Bates never got the chance to turn a single racing lap.
During the final seconds of Practice 3, Zach Bates suffered an ABS glitch coming over Skyline which sent him head on into the tyres at the Esses.
The significant damage sustained to the
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early end.
The three-time Australian Production Car champion still said it is the right time to jump off:
“Motorsport seems to be far more proficient at writing scripts for nightmares than fairy tales,” Osborne said.
“This weekend brings to an end a 35year career for me in which I’ve achieved some of my childhood dreams.
“My head has been wrestling with my heart for quite some time now, but I’m confident that now is the right time to step away.”
The session itself saw Crick send a statement before qualifying, being the first and only driver of the weekend to post a time in the 2m21s window.
His 2:21.7649 was nine-tenths faster than the next best of McLennan/Russell/ Smollen.
But come qualifying it was the Supercars drivers who stole the show as some record-breaking pace was on display.
In the end Davison secured his second straight Bathurst 6 Hour pole with a 2:22.2531.
It was a full half a second clear of next best Tyler Everingham, who won a tight fight for second best ahead of Randle, Ojeda and Crick.
Davison’s time smashed the previous 6 Hour qualifying lap record of 2:22.904 set by Leahey in 2019 by seven-tenths.
The leading non-BMW was the Ford Mustang of Aaron Seton in seventh, just over 2s adrift, as the leading A2 competitor, narrowly ahead of Josh Muggleton.
The top A1 car was Kiwi Paul Blomqvist in 17th; first in B1 was Courtney Prince in 26th; while classes C and D were led by Patrick Navin (30th) and Jaylyn Robotham (40th) respectively.
SUNDAY
SUNNY SKIES greeted competitors on race day, Easter Sunday, with 58 of the 61 entered cars lining up on the grid for the eighth running of the 6 Hour.
At the rolling start, Davison led away from pole position ahead of Everingham, but the latter could only retain second for one lap before Randle surged ahead.
The first victim was the #27 of Grant and Iain Sherrin. Sitting ninth on lap 2, their #27 BMW was sent into the Skyline sand after a clash with the #121 of Chris Delfsma, Rylan Gray and Ryan Casha.
Despite the setback sending them to last and three laps down, the Sherrins would ultimately fight back to an impressive sixth outright and fourth in class.
The first victim of the race was the #69 of John Bowe, Ashley Wright and David Brown as early as lap seven.
But it was the stoppage of the Ian Cowley Astra on lap 14 that brought the leaders into the lane for the first time where the McLennan team did not meet the minimum pit stop time.
Their day took another turn for the worse when contact at the restart in the run up to Hell Corner resulted in a right rear puncture.
The Scott Turner/Rob Rubis/Jordan Cox BMW also had a tough opening period, starting from the pit lane after missing the pre-race pit exit cut off.
Cox then flew all the way up to 10th until an overheating gearbox ended his chase on lap 25.
A series of crashes at the top of the Mountain then sparked regular Safety Cars.
Tyler Mecklem had a heavy whack with the wall in the run up to McPhillamy Park and Tyler Cheney fell victim to The Cutting with both drivers losing a wheel on impact, while Graeme Wakefield got it wrong at Skyline.
At the halfway mark of the stop-start race, the Ford Mustang Mach 1 of Gommersall/ Seton/Gommersall held the lead over another Mustang fronted by Ryder Quinn.
But within the next hour the BMWs regained control with the #23 enjoying a comfortable 15s lead which was almost thrown away by Leahey when he had a massive scare in the run up to Forrests Elbow.
With just over two hours to go, Ojeda had the #1 in P1 but Crick had the lights on and was all over the back of him.
After an intense battle Crick hit the lead
with a move around the outside at The Chase, but his race was hit by a 15s penalty for passing under Safety Car.
The #118 led until just before the end of the fifth hour when Crick was the first of the contenders to box and serve the penalty.
This took place moments before it was game over for the leading A2 car of Quinn, who got out of shape under the ‘Tree’ and lost the rear before spearing face first into the outside concrete wall.
The impact was so heavy it knocked the on-board camera out of place.
It was around the same time when Crick’s challenge also finished due to losing oil pressure which forced the #118 to finish 10 laps down.
But this did not diminish the all-BMW sprint as Supercars main game and codrivers put the foot down in pursuit of victory during a thrilling final hour.
Davison controlled the race until just shy of half an hour to go when suddenly a gearbox issue allowed Ojeda to blaze into the lead down Conrod.
To add to the drama, a record 12th and final Safety car, caused by a smoking Subaru steered by Dimitri Agathos and Bill Riding, bunched up the field.
The stoppage set up an 18-minute sprint to the flag with Ojeda leading the field unto battle.
The gearbox issue returned momentarily for Davison, who was defenceless going down Conrod and lost second to Randle, who had to take to the grass just prior to the final hump prior to The Chase.
Both Randle and Davison regained ground on Ojeda to set up a nail-biting final lap amid some traffic drama.
But once again the ‘Juice’ saved his best for when it mattered to ensure both he and Hodges become the first drivers to win back to back Bathurst 6 Hours.
Behind them Randle and Davison went side by side through the final corner with the former prevailing in the Race For A Cure entry.
It was a wild way to end another big Easter weekend of racing around The Mountain.
Thomas Miles
started on a high at Mount Panorama
three winners from as many races and a tie in points.
Despite both Eddy Beswick and Cody Maynes-Rutty collecting 50 points across the weekend, it is the former who emerged with the championship lead courtesy of his final race win.
The 2024 season opener was always going to be a grand occasion as it was the first time the prestigious category had raced at Bathurst since 2019.
Jack Bussey started strong by being the only driver in the 2m18s window in qualifying to take pole with a 2:18.7682, three tenths faster then Maynes-Rutty.
However, Bussey got a slow start from pole, allowing the fast-starting Harrison Sellars
to rise from fourth to first before the Safety Car was required for a four-car crash at The Cutting. Fraser Hie, Logan Eveleigh, Lachlan Strickland and Nico Mendez were all caught up in the carnage.
The stoppage meant only a one-lap dash was possible to decide the race and Sellars held firm to take out the season opener ahead of Maynes-Rutty and Beswick, while poleman Bussey had to settle for sixth.
Sellar retained his lead at the start of the second race but Daniel Frougas looked racey.
Frougass pounced at Murrays Corner and pulled off a successful move to steal the lead.
To make matters worse for Sellar, he was tagged by Liam Loiacono at the same lefthander, causing both to spin.
Beswick led lap three, only for Maynes-
A FULL grid of Improved Production Cars hit Mount Panorama for the first time since 2019 over the Easter weekend and none could lay a hand on Adam Poole.
Poole in his CV8 Monaro started as favourite and dominated the weekend, winning all four races and taking pole a record time of 2:18.19, including a top speed of 296kmh on Conrod Straight.
Race 1 was marred by an accident between Turn 2 and The Cutting when NSW’s Matthew Birks suffered a mechanical failure that left Andrew McMaster’s BMW E30 with nowhere to go.
The incident caused a Safety Car and ultimately a time-certain finish.
Poole pressed on in Race 2, flying to an unbeatable lead before another early finish was required when South Australia’s Dom Coppola found the gravel trap at The Chase.
The third race was action packed, with Tasmanian Adam Williams tagging the
McPhillamy Park wall on cold tyres on the opening lap in his Holden Torana and dropping oil across the track at Forrest Elbow.
Peter Hennessey in his BMW M3 initially did a fantastic job missing the walls and getting off the track quickly after being first to the oil and spinning.
But there were no such dramas for Poole as he cruised to a 5s win in the seven-lap affair.
The fourth and final race, held on Sunday morning, brought cooler conditions and set the scene for both the outright and Under 2-litre lap records to be broken.
Poole and Kurt Macready, in his under 2-litre Nissan Silvia, reset the long-standing overs and unders records of Ray Hislop (Ford Falcon BA) and Jordan Cox (Honda Civic) respectively.
Poole smashed Hislop’s record by seven tenths of a second with a blistering 2:18.1913.
Boosted by the record time, the #1 Monaro cruised to a massive 1m20s win.
Ratty to snatch P1 on the penultimate lap just in the nick of time.
Separate incidents for Zak Lobko and William Lowing at Hell Corner and Griffins Bend respectively saw the race finish under the Safety Car with Maynes-Ratty leading Beswick and Frougas.
Beswick and Maynes-Ratty led the field away at the start of the third and deciding race.
But another Safety Car was required as early as lap one after Logan Eveleigh found the fence at Griffins Bend after contact with Gary Collins.
Another victim was Imogen Radburn, due to a clutch failure off the start.
When racing resumed a race-long battle for both the race and round win was sparked between Beswick and Maynes-Batty.
Also showing speed were Kobi Williams and Frougas, who clawed their way up to the front in the dying laps.
In a thrilling affair there were several changes for the lead in the final laps as the leaders went wheel-to-wheel.
In the end, Beswick edged out Williams, Maynes-Rutty and Frougas as just half a second covered the top four across the line.
The Formula Ford season heads to Winton Motor Raceway on April 26-28.
Thomas Miles
Although Chris Brown finished the final race second, runner-up in round honours was Victorian state champion Luke Grech-Cumbo in his VX Senator. This left Brown third in his Toyota AE 86 Sprinter, whilst there were a number of great battles amid a variety of cars throughout the top 10 featuring Scott Cook, Paul Cruse (Silvias) Robert Braune, Lachlan McBrien
The Under Two-litre category witnessed fierce racing that ended with a podium full of NSW Nissans – led by the Silvias of Macready and Ryan Gorton.
The SSS Pulsar of Michael Ricketts rounded out the rostrum.
Joseph Lenthall
THE 2024 Porsche Carrera Cup Australia season began at Albert Park and a number of drivers made statements on and off the track.
The biggest was made by Harri Jones, who showed why he is determined to become just the second repeat Carrera Cup champion.
Jones was a dominant figure at his new home Porsche Centre Melbourne, but Dale Wood kept him honest all weekend before tensions flared in a wild final race.
The 2022 series champion fresh from Europe was on the pace straight away, taking pole by a commanding half a second margin from impressive young Queenslanders Marcos Flack and Ryder Quinn.
Jackson Walls’ pursuit of the title he came close to last year suffered a horror start, finishing last in qualifying after a spin at the highspeed Turn 8, while Pro Am went to Adrian Flack.
The opening race turned into the Jones show as he enjoyed an untroubled run to the chequered flag.
Despite two Safety Car stoppages, at each restart Jones was able to charge away from the field and would eventually secure a lights to flag win by 6s.
Bayley Hall won the competitive fight for second, while Wood charged from seventh to third as Scott Pye’s Carrera Cup debut ended early due to damage in the right front radiator.
Rodney Jane used his experience to prevail in Pro Am. Jones went back to back on Friday but this time he had a much bigger battle on his hands. Starting on the front row and
ready to race was Wood, who flew off the line and into the lead.
However, he had no answer when Jones launched an aggressive and calculated counterattack at the fast Turn 9.
The PCM driver caught Wood napping and within a lap the battle was effectively over with the #12 already a second up the road.
David Russell was an early victim after clipping the tyre bundle at the first corner and experiencing a massive lock up at Turn 3, he dropped out of action as soon as Turn 4 with suspected coolant issues.
In the end Jones cruised to another big 6s win as Wood just held off Quinn in the battle for second as Pye secured fourth. Adrian Flack was in a league of his own in Pro Am, taking that out by 18s.
FOR THE second race in a row, Wood made another brilliant start to surge ahead of Jones off the line in the finale, but behind the leaders there was bedlam at Turn 1. Fabian Coulthard locked up and speared into the side of rookie Glen Wood, who in turn sent Dylan O’Keeffe to the grass.
In addition to the trio, a further nine cars of Pye, Nick McBride, Angelo Mouzouris, Lockie Bloxsom, Nash Morris, Matt Belford, Daniel Stutterd, Sam Shahin, and Marc Cini all took evasive action.
However, not all could avoid further contact, with Matt Slavin sending Jane into a spin and Matt Belford hitting Coulthard, while Dean Cook had a separate incident with Harrison Goodman.
The drama meant the Safety Car
was required and when racing resumed there was more drama at Turn 1 where Bayley Hall and Marco Gill locked up into the gravel.
Quinn also sacrificed his grip on third by running wide at Turn 4, allowing Marcos Flack to move ahead.
Then it became the Jones and Wood show as the pair went at it hammer and tong for the lead.
Jones managed to make a pass for the lead at Turn 11, only for a tap by Wood to unsettle him and the 2022 champion eventually dropped to fourth after both Marcos Flack and Walls also got by.
Wood crossed the line just over 2s ahead of Marcos Flack, but the matter was far from over.
Wood was stripped of his win due to a 5s penalty for his contact with Jones which elevated Flack to victory lane, becoming the second youngest ever Carrera Cup winner at 18 years and 15 days.
Driving standards observer Craig Baird and Wood had an animated discussion behind the podium on the matter, while the latter also had an altercation with Jones in the paddock, which saw the PCM driver fined $10,000.
After a wild opener, the Porsche Carrera Cup Australia Championship heads across the ditch for the first time to race at Taupo on April 19-21.
Thomas Miles
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THANKS TO A MIX OF BRILLIANT DRIVING AND GREAT ASSISTANCE FROM FORD, CHEVROLET CLEANED UP ALL FOUR RACES AT A SHORT, SHARP AND HIGH-OCTANE SPRINT ROUND AT THE GRAND PRIX. THOMAS MILES REFLECTS ON A BUSY WEEKEND AT ALBERT PARK …
SPRINT RACING was back in vogue at the Melbourne SuperSprint, which promised to throw up something different – and certainly did.
For the first time in two decades, since 2004 Gold Coast, there were no compulsory stops on the agenda and the four-race weekend was a throwback to the 1990s.
Although there was no strategy in the pit lane, drivers still had to strategise themselves by being selective in using the life of their Soft tyres.
The end result was a frantic and busy round of racing with each of the four races throwing up plenty of talking points.
Although Triple Eight carried on its dominance as teammates Broc Feeney and Will Brown shared the championship lead and wrestled for the Larry Perkins Trophy, it was far from a one-sided affair.
Some Mustang rivals posed great threats only to throw away wins by scoring some own goals, while an underdog rose to the top as a popular winner.
AFTER A near-perfect weekend at Bathurst, Triple Eight was the team to beat coming to Melbourne and picked up from where it left off. A late lap sent Feeney from last to first in
qualifying to take pole, but he could not make the most of it as the fast-starting Anton De Pasquale led into Turn 1.
However, the presence of the #11 DJR Mustang in the lead barely lasted three corners before De Pasquale had a poor exit out of Turn 3 and Feeney needed no second invitation.
The #88 then controlled the remainder of the race, but not without Brown looking dangerous.
After finding the grass at Turn 8, Feeney only held a 0.8s lead at midway and this gap was halved within two laps.
But the #88 had enough pace to have the
final say, icing the race by pulling 2.3s in the final five laps and saluting the chequered flag in style by taking the five bonus points for the fastest lap.
With Matt Payne (21) joining Feeney (21) and Brown (25) on the podium, they became the youngest ever trio to stand on the podium with a combined average age of just 22 years and 327 days. The previous record was 23 years and 234 days set by Feeney, Brown and Brodie Kostecki in race 3 at Wanneroo last year.
Although Payne ended with a trophy, it was far from smooth sailing while it would not be the only time the Triple Eight teammates raced hard.
podium on Thursday was a memorable one because it almost did not happen.
After staving off the likes of Chaz Mostert, De Pasquale and Nick Percat amid the early race jostling for position, Payne held down third from lap six.
However, the Kiwi bowled a wide at the penultimate corner of the race, going off and gifting third to Percat.
Fortunately for Penrite Racing, the MSR driver had a 5s penalty hanging over him due to sending Mostert off at the same left hander and the #19 retained the podium
despite being fourth on the road.
When recalling the moment, the Kiwi admitted his shock behind the wheel.
“At the end I don’t really know what happened,” Payne said.
“I was just driving, came into Turn 13, grabbed the front and then grabbed both pedals.
“I was not even managing it and it was like my foot slipped off the brake and I ended up in the grass.
“I was thinking ‘oh my god, this is going to be really bad and I have made a fool of myself’ ...”
The opening race was action packed with a number of other spot fires, most notably at the final corner where Jaxon Evans went backwards into the wall.
Replays were not clear but the stewards did investigate the part Thomas Randle played and ruled no penalty was needed.
However, Evans believes there was certainly a second party.
“There was no penalty handed out so there was no issue from the other car involved but from my position it seemed pretty desperate for lap 2 of the race,” Evans told Auto Action
“The same driver went off earlier ... but it is what it is. I am not here to open the door and let people through so we will continue to race hard.”
In Friday’s Race 4, Turn 13 was a hot spot once again and the moment had a massive say on the destination of the Larry Perkins Trophy.
Another Triple Eight 1-2 appeared a certainty
even know how it held together,” Payne said. “I can’t even really remember what happened but I think I was on the outside of Turn 3 and wasn’t really willing to give up my spot.
“He (Anton) was sort of crowding me out so I sort of said ‘nah I am going to pitch it in here’.
“It is kind of weird because we locked wheels and the steering just completely came out of my hands.
“It was a bit of a hard hit and I was really lucky to make it home.”
WHEN THE weekend arrived, Ford looked poised to finally end Triple Eight’s stranglehold on the 2024 season.
Overcast skies and cool conditions on Saturday morning saw Gen3 Supercars go faster than ever around Albert Park in the thrillingly fast back to back qualifying sessions and the Mustangs found the most speed.
The fight for Race 5 pole was breathtaking as there were four lead changes in the final minutes.
Despite all the big names having a crack, Payne emerged with the fastest time to secure a maiden career pole.
He was determined to convert it into a victory and the race started promisingly.
Although Waters got the jump when the lights went out, Payne was a man on a mission and hit back on lap two with a wellexecuted move down the inside at Turn 11 to retake the lead, which sparked a wild battle for the lead.
as Brown led Feeney until the penultimate corner of the penultimate lap.
Feeney made the same mistake as Payne, ‘grabbing the front’ and running wide.
Unfortunately for the #88, both the opportunistic Mark Winterbottom and Payne snuck through to knock the then championship leader to fourth.
With Brown getting a second win for Triple Eight, he stole the championship lead –Feeney was furious with himself.
“I was following Will around trying to save our tyres like he was, and as it got to the end of the race, I went to go for the fastest lap but a few corners before I started my lap, my foot fell off the brake pedal and I made an error. I’m spewing for the team because it would have been another solid result ... but you’ll take the little loss,” Feeney recalled.
Mostert was no factor in this race as he slumped from ninth to 18th due to tyre dramas, while De Pasquale was out of action on the opening lap due to steering damage from a wheel to wheel clash with Payne.
Although De Pasquale had to retire, Payne could soldier on and managed to collect a second podium.
But by his own admission it was a “miracle” believing the damage sustained on the opening lap would be too much to make it home.
“I had two spokes missing out of my right front wheel so I don’t
Waters then tucked under Payne’s wing before touching up the bumper of the covering Kiwi in the braking zone to Turn 13. This unsettled Payne and Waters tried to pounce, lining up a move around the outside of the final corner.
However, Payne had the same idea and swung across to the outside to open up the right hander exit.
With two Fords vying for the same piece of tarmac, they collided and careered into the concrete in a race-ending collision.
To rub salt into the wounds, it was a beautiful gift for Triple Eight as both Red Bull Camaros eased into the lead.
Waters was so angry he furiously marched to Payne’s car to give him some words before slamming the door to the delight of the crowd.
Payne admitted he had no idea Waters was on his outside.
“I was just trying to race pretty fairly I thought, but didn’t think there was any real need to hit me off in the second to last corner I
Chaz Mostert.
opportunity to get a good run onto the main straight and he was there.
“I didn’t even know he was there. It is unfortunate; we were in a good position to win the race.”
Even if that was the case, Waters was still not impressed.
“At 13 he just choked it up and I got under him. I just tried to set him up for the last corner and he just cut across,” Waters said.
“If he didn’t know I was there it was pretty bad spatial awareness.
“Brand new car and in the wall. It is just shit.”
No penalty was dished out as the stewards believed “each driver contributed to the incident.”
After the seas parted, Feeney led Brown in another 1-2 as Mostert had to settle for third despite having a spirited crack at the #87 after just 10 laps and six under green flag conditions due to the Safety Car.
ALTHOUGH THE Ford fans were hurting from the events of Saturday night, they remained optimistic about another golden opportunity ahead in Sunday’s finale.
Again the top three positions on the grid were Mustangs and Payne nailed the start to control the field into Turn 1.
The Kiwi quickly took control and pulled almost a second on Mostert, who settled into second ahead of Percat with the MSR driver critically jumping Waters for third.
Although Payne had built some breathing space, it was soon wiped out by Mostert on the second lap.
The two Mustangs ran nose to tail as they flew down Lakeside Drive, but incredibly, yet again, the Fords tripped over each other when jousting for the lead. This time the clash occurred at the fast Turns 9-10 complex.
Mostert was right under the rear wing of Payne and tried to follow the leader into the left-hander, only to lock up.
Payne fell to fourth behind new leader Percat, Feeney and Waters, while Mostert slotted in sixth and received a 5s penalty for his part in the accident.
The WAU star put his hand up for causing the race-changing clash.
“Huge apologies to Matty Payne, the whole team at Grove and all their fans,”
“We were racing for sheep stations out
there and I was chasing him down into ‘9’ and with the aero and cold tyre there I just pinched the front.
“As we have seen over the years if you
time it was Bryce Fullwood who sent the #19 into a spin, at Turn 1.
Payne would ultimately come home 15th as a weekend full of promise would end in heartbreaking fashion.
He was glad that Chaz personally apologised.
“I get over things pretty quick and it’s good to see him own up and take responsibility,”
Payne said on the Cool Down Lap Podcast.
“Chaz is a better driver than that. He’s a world class driver and I just expect him not to make those mistakes when he’s behind you.
“I really appreciate it when other drivers apologise for things – that means a lot to me.
“It (the accident) was pretty disappointing. I felt like I did everything right in terms of the start and it was probably the best one I had in two years.
“Sometimes you mess up, but yeah, you just got to give yourself a little bit of margin when you’re following that close, especially
IRONICALLY MOSTERT’S mistake opened the door for his former teammate to make a stunning return to victory lane.
Percat and Mostert shared a garage together for the last two years at WAU but the South Australian “hated every second” of his return to the team.
However, in 2024 Percat is a refreshed and rejuvenated figure at Matt Stone Racing.
Across the first five races of the championship the #10 had finished in the top 10 and was once again at the front of the field in Race 6.
Following a good start and passing Waters, Percat was in the right place at the right time to surge to the lead when the Mustangs tripped over each other.
However, the race was far from over as the Matt Stone Racing underdog had to keep some charging Triple Eight Camaros at bay.
Percat had enjoyed at least a second of Feeney, but by lap eight the #88 launched an attack at Turn 11.
But Percat did not back down, immediately responding with a smart criss-cross at the following right hander.
As their battle continued on the exit of the penultimate corner, Brown joined the fun and snatched second from his teammate after a serious battle from the pit straight to Turn 5.
The Triple Eight tussle allowed Percat to rebuild his lead only for Brown to tear it down.
in the finale, he did enough to become the latest winner of the Larry Perkins Trophy.
It keeps the streak alive with the five different winners from five events since the Australian Grand Prix became a championship round in 2018.
It took so much out of the MSR Camaro that it ran out of fuel on the slow-down lap, forcing Percat to run the entire F1 pit lane to reach victory lane ... but he didn’t mind.
The win ended a tough four-year hiatus since his last success, at SMP, during which Percat was pushed to the edge of giving up. But that is now in the rear vision mirror and he has come out the other side as a winner.
The final two laps became a nail-biting showdown but Percat’s smart defensive work exiting the flowing corners proved critical as he held on by three tenths.
ALTHOUGH BROWN finished second best
Brown joined fellow Triple Eight drivers Jamie Whincup (2018) and Shane van Gisbergen (2022) whilst Chaz Mostert and Brodie Kostecki won the 2019 and 2023 rounds respectively.
Consistency was key for Brown, who won just one of the four races in the 2024 Melbourne SuperSprint, but finished second in three other races, including the finale where he charged from ninth on the grid.
“I was pretty keen to lock this one away, getting the Larry Perkins Trophy means a lot to me,” Brown said.
After an action-packed weekend of sprint racing, Supercars heads across the ditch for the first time in two years to take on a new challenge in Taupo on April 19-21.
TOYOTA HAS landed its first blow in the 2024 FIA World Rally Championship by taming a wild Safari Rally Kenya with a commanding 1-2 led by Kalle Rovanpera.
Rovanpera, who is only doing a parttime campaign in 2024, hit back from a disappointing Rally Sweden by taking out a dominant 1m37s win over Toyota teammate Takamoto Katsuta.
Whilst many found trouble, the two-time champion and co-driver Jonne Halttunen were faultless across the 19-stage event, which is renowned as one of the most demanding in the world.
Rovanpera, who was the only Rally1 driver not to find any trouble across the three days in the dirt, said “clever driving” was the key.
“It is always special, this event is so tough and also it is a legendary event for Toyota, and we have always been good here and we are still continuing to do that,” said Rovanpera.
“I think me and Jonne did a good job, I think you cannot do a better Safari Rally than what we did, we had no issues for the whole weekend, and it was clever driving. I think it was a good effort.
“We had zero issues on the car and the tyres so I don’t think you can drive more clever at this rally. We were fast, we had the speed, but it was not about that, we had the speed and we used it well.”
Whilst Rovanpera ended on top, it was the Hyundai of Thierry Neuville that raced out of the blocks.
The most gruelling WRC event once
again began with the traditional side-byside Kasarani super special in the centre of Nairobi.
Neuville edged out Ott Tanak by a slender 0.1s but bigger challenges were ahead.
On Friday, six demanding stages were on offer and Rovanpera rose to the occasion.
The Finn recorded a stunning sweep of all six stages to surge into a rally lead he would never let go.
As Rovanpera completed the perfect day, Neuville was hit by a right-rear puncture on Stage 3 and lost 19.9s.
To further strengthen the Toyota driver’s advantage more of his nearest rivals found trouble.
Esapekka Lappi trailed Rovanpera by 15.5s heading to the afternoon only for the Hyundai driver to suffer a transmission issue, which ruled him out for the remainder of the day, effectively ending his overall chances.
Lappi said there was no warning before the “explosion”.
“The gearbox exploded,” said Lappi.
“At first it started to go to front wheel drive
and after one acceleration there was no impact or a really big noise coming from it, it just went to front wheel drive.
“A couple of hundred metres later there was no pull from the car at all it didn’t matter if I was in first or fifth gear.”
This vaulted fellow Hyundai driver Tanak into second place, but only briefly as the Estonian crashed on the following stage.
Tanak appeared to have hit a stone when negotiating a left hander and the impact sent the
As a result Rovanpera was in a league of his own, entering the weekend with a massive 56.9s lead over Toyota teammate Elfyn Evans.
The leader’s run of six straight stage wins was broken by Katsuta, who edged out the rejoining Lappi.
Saturday proved to be a battle for survival as both Toyota contenders Evans and Katsuta lost time due to costly punctures.
Although Neuville and Lappi were the beneficiaries, they took aim at the rally organisers.
“It was a good run, but we were told
that the road wouldn’t be modified after recce. We had a big moment. They put big stones in the middle of the road,” Neuville said.
“The organisers are not doing a good job. They promised us that nothing will change, but they changed things after the recce which is really shit,” continued Lappi.
With such a strong advantage, Rovanpera only won one of the final 12 stages as he took a cautious approach to protect his lead.
It proved to be a masterstroke as Evans was hit by “mystery” punctures and Neuville suffered a fuel system issue.
A haul of 20 points gave Rovanpera a mighty win as a Stage 11 win helped Katsuta seal second ahead of the consistent Adrien Fourmaux, who secured a second straight podium for M-Sport.
Despite collecting 19 points, Neuville had to settle for fifth, but that was enough to retain the championship lead over the fourth placed Evans.
The FIA World Rally Championship returns to Europe for the first taste of tarmac in Croatia on April 18-21.
Thomas Miles
2024 FIA WRC CHAMPIONSHIP AFTER ROUND 3
1: T. Neuville 67 points
2: E. Evans 61
3: A. Fourmaux 46
4: O. Tanak 33
5: K. Rovanpera 31
WILLIAM BYRON became the first repeat winner of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season by controlling the opening road course race at COTA the week before Richmond.. Byron controlled the majority of the race from pole after a fight against the likes of Tyler Reddick, Chris Bell, Alex bowman, Ty Gibbs and Ross Chastain.
A fast final stop shot Byron clear of his rivals and despite a late charge from Bell, the #24 held on by 0.692s.
After the iconic #24 also won the Daytona 500, it is the first repeat win of the season while it pushed Hendrick Motorsports to a record 28th NASCAR road course win.
Despite being in control with the best part of a 3s advantage inside the final 10 laps, Byron admitted he was fighting to get his Camaro around the demanding 20-turn layout.
“I feel like I made a lot of mistakes in the last 10 laps, just micro-errors and Christopher was really fast there on the longer run,” he said in Victory Lane.
“We’ve had a little bit of a rough stretch the
last few weeks but put a lot of preparation in this past week and just thankful for the team I have around me and all the people back home as well.”
The race ran green all day despite a number of incidents occurring around the circuit. Byron led from pole on the inside with Tyler Reddick hot on his heels ahead of Gibbs, but Bell stayed out to lead the field at the
completion of the opening stage.
But the #24 was soon back in the lead when racing resumed, making good use of the fresh rubber to soar around the outside of the #20 at Turn 15.
The first flashpoint occurred in Stage 2 when Brad Keslowski spun Bubba Wallace, while there was even more action when Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Kamui Kobayashi fiercely
got stuck into each other at Turns 8 and 9.
Harrison Burton, Josh Berry, Kyle Larson, Ryan Preece, Keslowski and Ryan Blaney also rotated in separate incidents.
The most heated was a clash between Bell and Kyle Busch with the latter having some choices post-race words after getting spun by the #20.
At the start of Stage 3 Byron locked up at Turn 1, allowing both Gibbs and Chastain through on the inside.
With 26 to go Byron launched a counterattack on Chastain and the pair ran side by side across the entire pit straight before the #24 hit the lead at the top of the hill.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver controlled the remainder of the race despite a late challenge from Bell, who fell just short.
It was Shane van Gisbergen’s first Cup Series race for Kaulig Racing, but it was far from an easy race for the Kiwi, being caught speeding on pit road before losing first gear in the final stage to cross the line 21st.
Thomas Miles
Despite Truex Jr leading 228 of the 407 laps, he lost the lead in Overtime which was required after Kyle Larson was spun by Bubba Wallace with two laps to go.
The entire field then went to pit road where Hamlin got the jump and the veteran kept his cool in the two-lap dash to secure a 58th career win and fifth on home turf.
With his pit crew playing such a pivotal role sending the #11 out from third to first, Hamlin was quick to label the result as “a team win for sure”.
To rub salt into the wounds for Truex Jr both Joey Logano and Kyle Larson also snuck by to demote the #19 back to fourth.
The veteran was not impressed with his teammate Hamlin, even giving him a serve post race.
“It is unfortunate and that has happened a few times over the years,” Truex Jr said.
“We were in a great spot but got beat up in the pits and then Denny jumped the start and used me up into Turn 1.
“It definitely sucks but we will just have to come back next week.”
The Toyota Owners 400 had a delayed start due to a storm, which created just the second NASCAR Cup Series oval race ever to start on the wet-weather tyre.
Larson led unchallenged into Turn 1; however Elliott got a grand run through the final turn and flew past to just prior to the start finish line.
As the track dried out Larson returned to the lead prior to the first caution at lap 30 where the field switched to dry tyres.
Larson and Wallace went side-byside for a number of laps fighting for
both the lead and the dry line with the #5 eventually prevailing to take out the opening Stage.
The segment ended under yellow after Josh Berry tagged Daniel Suarez with the Trackhouse just driver unable to stop the Camaro from spinning after a desperate attempt at saving it.
Larson regained control before Truex Jr hit the lead and set the pace for the remainder of the second Stage, which was briefly interrupted when Kyle Busch found trouble by whacking the wall.
The final stage started with Truex Jr nailing the restart and opening a big lead.
With 63 to go Larson shot ahead of the #19 on pit road, but the #5 could only stay in front for a lap.
The immediate fightback down at Turn 1 appeared to be the race-winning move with Truex Jr cruising with two laps to go until the resuming Wallace and Larson rivalry ended in tears with the #5 spin creating an Overtime finish and turning the race on its head.
Whilst Joe Gibbs Racing did secure the
expected win, it was Hamlin who snatched it at the death with a little help from his friends in the lane.
NASCAR stays in Virginia to chase the prestigious Grandfather Clock at Martinsville this weekend.
Thomas Miles
NASCAR CUP SERIES POINTS
1: M. Truex Jr 220 points
2: T. Gibbs 215
3: R. Blaney 211
4: D. Hamlin 206
5: K. Larson 205
JORGE MARTIN surged to the MotoGP championship lead after cleaning up in Portugal, while Ducati stars Francesco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez clashed.
Heading to the Algrave, the question was who could stop Bagnaia after he opened his chase of a hat-trick of titles with victory, but things did not go his way in Portugal.
It started in qualifying where factory Ducati teammate Enea Bastianini took pole as the #1 had to settle for fourth.
Bagnaia looked on track to cruise to a Sprint success, only to fly off at Turn 1 and drop to fourth.
This handed the win to Maverick Vinales, who led home Marc Marquez and Martin by a second.
Despite Bastianini getting a good getaway, Martin had an even better one and flew from third to the lead at Turn 1 and controlled the remainder of the race from there.
But the action took place behind the #89 Pramac Ducati with Franco Morbedelli, Alex Marquez and Raul Fernandez all crashing in the early laps.
The three KTMs of Aussie Jack Miller, Brad Binder and Pedro Acosta had a tussle and it was actually the highly rated Tech3 rookie who won out.
Acosta pushed the boundaries as he made some fearless moves against the likes of Bagnaia and Marquez on his way to taking a special podium in just his second MotoGP race weekend.
After Bagnaia and Marquez lost out to Acosta, they went head-to-head for fifth on lap 22 when disaster struck.
The #93 dived down the inside at the double apex Turn 5 before the #1 tried to perform the switchback.
Marquez tried to shut the door and contact was made, seeing the two Ducati heavyweights fall with fury into the gravel. Neither alpha wanted to accept
responsibility ...
“In the end, of course for me it was a mistake from Peco, but not just the incident because, in the end he tried to come back. Okay, it was too optimistic and contact can happen ...” Marquez said.
“He was suffering a lot, especially with
the rear tyres, so it’s not necessary to come back in that aggressive mode, but he decided like this and the consequence to Ducati is zero points.”
“When Marc arrived, he tried to overtake and went wide, so I tried to close the line,” Bagnaia explained.
“He crossed his line and we collided. It’s something that makes me angry, but it’s a racing incident and we have to move on to the next one.”
In more drama, Vinales, who was in a safe second had a gearbox issue before falling at Turn 1, promoting Bastianini to second and Acosta to third.
It also helped Miller rise to fifth which was still a big result for the Australian, who secured his first top five Grand Prix result in his last 18 attempts.
MotoGP heads to COTA for round 3 on April 12-14.
Thomas Miles
MOTOGP CHAMPIONSHIP AFTER ROUND 2
1: Jorge Martin 60 points
2: Brad Binder 42
3: Enea Bastianini 39
4: Francesco Bagnaia 37
5: Pedro Acosta 28
has continued his strong start to 2024 by finishing second in the non-championship IndyCar All Star race at Thermal Club that was dominated by Alex Palou.
McLaughlin finished second to the dominant Palou, who cruised to a 5.7s win in the $1 Million Challenge exhibition race, where fellow Kiwi Marcus Armstrong also put in a fine drive to score fifth.
The Team Penske Kiwi also finished third in the IndyCar opener at St Petersburg.
McLaughlin won $350,000 for his drive and believed Palou was in another league, but was thrilled with his start, where he claimed two spots from fourth to set up his runner-up finish.
“I better put some money up at the bar tonight,” McLaughlin joked.
“Our XPEL Chevy just didn’t have quite enough for Alex (Palou). Congrats to him and his team.
“Once you got that clear air, it was good.
“I thought maybe that first restart would be okay, just to have a bit of a play around
and see if we can get him, but ultimately just settled for my pace to make sure we came home in a good spot.
“I was pumped with my first restart. My first restart was a lot of fun. I got from fourth to second, and that really set up our race.”
McLaughlin started second in a race that had drama straight away.
Colton Herta got into the back of Romain
sending
Frenchman into a
towards the pack going through Turn 1 with Rinus Veejay the unlucky driver, getting taken out, while Aussie Will Power had to take evasive action.
But up front, the Kiwi was racey, attacking Felix Rosenqvist for the lead around the outside of Turn 2.
In the end Rosenqvist held on to lead
home McLaughlin by half a second in the 10-lap heat.
With Power down in ninth and only the top six advancing, the Australian’s campaign ended early.
Palou dominated Heat 2, 5s ahead of Armstrong, who put in a good drive to second.
In the 20-lap main event Palou immediately sealed the lead with a strong rolling start to enjoy an untroubled journey into Turn 1.
Behind McLaughlin, who started fourth, and Rosenqvist went side-by-side for second and the Team Penske driver soared around the outside to snatch the position. This proved critical as McLaughlin followed Palou home to take second.
Armstrong was holding down fourth but could not keep a charging Herta from snatching the position.
After some fun at the Thermal Club, IndyCar championship status returns to the famous streets of Long Beach on April 21.
Thomas Miles
WITH TWO Australians taking centre stage in front of their home crowd, fans at the Australian Grand Prix had their interest piqued by Formula 3, with the series certainly not disappointing on an entertainment front during its second trip to Albert Park.
Home racer Christian Mansell came into the weekend on a high after securing a season-opening podium in Bahrain, looking to continue his streak in Melbourne.
Further down the grid, Van Amersfoort Racing’s Tommy Smith was hopeful of recreating his strong run at last year’s Australian Grand Prix, in which the Melbourne local drove from P27 to P12.
Both their campaigns, reaping mixed results, would start in Friday’s F3 qualifying session.
The session was headlined by Leo Fornaroli and the Prema Racing boys, with the ambitious youngsters trading the provisional front-row start between themselves.
Ultimately, Fornaroli out-paced Gabriele Miní by a slim 19-millisecond margin with his time of 1:33.044s, securing pole for the Feature Race at Albert Park.
Mansell, after qualifying in P10, was set to start the Sprint from third on the grid, while Smith’s messy final run placed him at the very back of the 30-driver grid for both races.
In the Sprint, Martinius Stenshorne fought all the way to the line to claim his maiden Formula 3 victory, sharing the podium with Arvid Lindblad and Laurens Van Hoepen after an action-packed 20 laps around Albert Park.
Mansell defended well off the line, however, ending his race out of the points in P12 after sustaining damage in early-race contact with Stenshorne.
It wasn’t much better for Smith, with the Australian finding himself causing a less-than-ideal incident on Lap 14.
Smith ran too hot into Turn 1, braking late and tagging the PHM AIX car of
Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak, ending the Thai driver’s race six laps early.
Smith was okay to continue, barring slight damage, which saw the #22 end his Saturday in P25.
FOR THE main event, Prema’s Dino Beganovic fought through the 23-lap tyre shredder to stand on the top step for the first time in his F3 career, surpassing his team-mate and holding off a late attack from Fornaroli.
As the lights went out, Fornaroli got an ideal launch, building an instant gap between himself and Miní and Beganovic.
The progress he’d made on lap one was neutralised, however, with the Safety Car being deployed for an incident that saw Joseph Loake and Smith bogged down in the gravel at Turn 11 after colliding.
At the restart, Fornaroli broke out of DRS range to Miní, leaving the fight up to the Prema Drivers.
The #1 was given the all-clear to attack his teammate, easing by a struggling Miní before catching the leading Trident and passing him through Turn 9 without much resistance.
By the chequered flag, the order would remain the same with Beganovic cruising home to his maiden F3 victory.
Mansell didn’t have the home race run that he was hoping for, however, securing the final points position as he crossed the line.
Similar to F2, Formula 3 will have a short testing stint in Barcelona before Round 3 in Imola, taking place from May 17 to 19.
Reese Mautone
FORMULA 3 CHAMPIONSHIP
AFTER ROUND 2
1: Luke Browning 37 points
2: Leonardo Fornaroli 37
3: Gabriele Mini 32
4: Dino Beganovic 28
5: Arvid Lindblad 23
WHILE THE main drawcard for this year’s record-breaking crowd was most certainly Formula 1, the up-and-coming field of Formula 2 drivers put on a threeday display of thrilling on-track action to form some of the spectacular highlights at the Australian Grand Prix.
Following their sole practice session, it was straight to business for the 22-man grid ... and qualifying certainly didn’t disappoint.
The first competitive session of the weekend proved chaotic, with two red flags disrupting the grid as they hunted down the elusive fastest time of the 30-minute session.
The first incident took place just minutes into the session, with Victor Martins finding himself stranded after recreating Alex Albon’s costly FP1 moment at the now incident-renowned Turn 7, albeit wrestling his car to successfully avoid the walls.
Qualifying was soon red-flagged again, this time for Jak Crawford who found his DAMS car in the barriers at Turn 12.
After a hectic last-ditch lap, it was Hauger who secured his first-ever F2 Feature Race pole ahead of Antonelli and Verschoor, with Roman Stanek earning Sprint pole from the reversed top-10 order.
In the opening metres of Saturday’s Sprint, second and fourth-placed starters Gabriel Bortoleto and Pepe Martí found their cars instantly hurtling towards the wall at the pit exit after colliding off the line.
Before being demoted for that moment, Hadjar impressed, taking the lead and maintaining it for the entire race despite two Safety Car periods.
The first was for the obvious start-line incident, while the second came in the heat of a five-car battle for P2.
Antonelli and Verschoor individually spun at Turn 12, with one ending in the grass-side barriers and the other buried in the gravel.
At the restart, Maini’s failed attack on Stanek cost him a podium finish, with Hauger making ground and eventually passing the Invicta Racing driver for P3.
Hadjar temporarily secured glory in Melbourne, crossing the line 6.8 seconds ahead of P2 before being handed a 10-second penalty post-race for causing the start-line incident.
HE REDEEMED himself in the Feature race, driving a mature race from P8 to the top step as anarchy unfolded behind.
On Lap 1, Stanek was sent spinning at Turn 3, however, it was Joshua Dursken at Turn 13 who prompted the first VSC interruption.
The second came as a full Safety Car, with Hauger’s car seemingly malfunctioning mid-corner at Turn 7, sending him hurtling across the gravel and into the wall.
The two cheap pitstop opportunities left the field jumbled, with Hadjar in the nett lead fighting past those who were yet to stop.
Antonelli also began making his way through the field, leading Aron to the podium places before the Estonian demoted him into a nett P3.
Antonelli was further demoted by Championship leader, Zane Maloney, seeing the Italian ending his race in P4. The lead Campos Racing driver cruised home to take the top step, claiming Feature Race victory by 4.7 seconds.
Before Round 4 in Imola, F2 will head to Barcelona for three days of testing from April 23 to 25.
Reese Mautone
FORMULA 2 CHAMPIONSHIP AFTER ROUND 3
1: Zane Maloney 62 points
2: Paul Aron 47
3: Dennis Hauger 41
4: Isack Hadjar 34
5: Kush Maini 33
Images: MOTORSPORT IMAGES
CARLOS SAINZ broke Max Verstappen and Red Bull’s domination with a dominant win in the Australian Grand Prix, the Spanish driver enjoying a sensational return to action after being forced out of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix due to appendicitis that required immediate surgery in Jeddah.
After being the only non-Red Bull driver to win a Grand Prix in 2023, with a very strategic masterpiece in Singapore, Sainz was really dominant in Melbourne and only his relative lack of fitness, after a full week in bed, kept his win in doubt until the last few laps.
What the first few Grands Prix of this season have shown is that the competition is so tight, throughout the field, that the slightest hiccup in Free Practice can derail a team’s entire weekend. In Jeddah, two weeks ago, it was Sainz’s sudden illness that crippled Ferrari’s challenge. In the first two practice sessions in Jeddah, Leclerc was able to match Verstappen and an in-pain Sainz was not far behind, but once there was just one experienced driver left for the Scuderia – for all the brilliant job Bearman did in tremendously hard circumstances – Red Bull just pulled away to dominate the rest of the weekend.
In Melbourne it was Red Bull’s turn to hit trouble. The RB15 was not as well ‘planted’ as Verstappen would like it, the deficit for Leclerc was almost 0.4s in FP2 and the
pace on the long runs was shocking by the Dutchman’s standards. Changes for FP3 improved the situation and set-up tweaks made the car better throughout qualifying, but it was clear the RB15 was not the dominant force seen in the first two Grands Prix.
But with Sainz making a small mistake on his final Q3 lap, Verstappen scored his third straight pole and a reasonable start kept him in the lead. The Dutchman, though, soon found out he was in trouble: “My right rear brake basically stuck on from when the lights went off. The temperatures
just kept increasing until the point, of course, it caught fire. I had that moment after the first lap, but then, already, the temperature was increasing and increasing, so it was just working like a handbrake.”
AFTER THE car was brought back to Red Bull’s garage at the end of the race the team got a better understanding of the situation, with Team Principal Christian Horner explaining that “we can see there’s been an issue where the caliper has created the brake to bind on, and that’s happened from the very start of the race. You can see the heat building and then, I think, as early as the second lap it was like Max has got a handbrake on. He had a moment in Turn 3, then another that allowed Carlos to pass him – but he was then lining up to have a go back and then had another moment and then we started to see the smoke and then the fire.”
Verstappen, for his part, put a brave face on, explaining that, “we had a lot of good races in a row, a lot of basically good reliability and I knew the day would come that you end up having a retirement and unfortunately that day was today.”
Sérgio Pérez didn’t provide the back-up Red Bull desperately needed either. The Mexican’s weekend derailed when he got a grid penalty for getting in Hulkenberg’s way during Q1, dropping from third to sixth, then lost a further position to Russell in the first lap, but
his race came alive after putting the Hard tyres on. He quickly passed the Mercedes driver on lap 21 and then Alonso six laps later, but then a visor tear off got stuck in the underside of his car and, according to Horner, “that cost him in excess of 20 points (of downforce), so it’s a significant amount.”
WORRIED ONLY about his own fitness, as he had Leclerc and the two McLarens under control, Sainz admitted that, “in the last 20 laps I was feeling a bit stiff, as I didn’t do any training since Jeddah and spent a full week in bed”. For the Spaniard, “from lap two, when I was leading, I thought with the pace I had yesterday, I knew I could get it done and, especially in clean air, manage the tyres. I could get it done. Then obviously the risk of a Safety Car or red flag was always in the back of my mind. But luckily it was a clean race and not too much happened.”
With Charles Leclerc in second place and setting the fastest lap of the race, the Scuderia scored maximum points in Melbourne, and the Monegasque got within four points of Verstappen in the championship, the same gap Ferrari has to Red Bull. All this is, of course, very positive for Ferrari, but Team Principal Frédéric Vasseur made it clear he’s not allowing anyone to get carried away:
“We don’t know what Max’s pace would have been and we’ll never find out either. For us it’s clear we’re still making progress and we executed a very clean weekend, with no issues, no laps lost in practice, no mistakes.” He then added that, “things are so tight at
the front, even with Max, that the slightest issue can put you on the back foot and you never recover. Yes, this weekend was great for us but there are still 21 Grands Prix to go, and we have to keep on doing the best job we can. I don’t think about Red Bull’s pace, Red Bull’s issues, because my focus in on making the team get better and better. It’s a great feeling to finish one-two in front of a magnificent crowd and so many tifosi, but the focus is already on doing the best weekend job in Japan.”
OSCAR PIASTRI got very close to what would have been a dream podium finish on home ground, with fourth place feeling like a bit of a disappointment for the youngster. With Lando Norris finishing in third and putting the pressure on Leclerc for most of the final stint, the result was a great one for McLaren but, of course, Piastri wanted more than P4.
Things started to go slightly wrong for the home hero, “when none of my Q3 laps were very clean”. Pérez’s post-qualifying penalty moved Norris to third and Piastri to fifth on the grid, positions they kept at the start, before being promoted one place each by Verstappen’s very early retirement.
Feeling the undercut would be the way to get the youngster ahead of Leclerc, McLaren called him in at the end of lap nine but Ferrari pre-empted the move, so the two men pitted at the same time and resumed in the same relative positions.
That left both Leclerc and Piastri with very long second stints to do and, as they both
pushed hard very early on, tyre degradation became an issue for the pair. The Australian admitted that “I struggled a little bit on the first set of Hards – I just grained them a little bit and then had a little bit of a moment.”
With Norris pitting much later, positions were reversed but the Englishman had much better pace, as his tyres were much fresher, so the order to swap positions came on lap 29 and Piastri accepted “it was a completely fair one”. Norris repaid the team’s faith by taking the battle to Leclerc but, eventually, was a few seconds short of his target.
Given he was 11.5s ahead of his team mate when a late VSC effectively ended the race with one and a half lap to go, it’s clear that, on the better strategy and with better tyre life, Norris was the most competitive of the two McLaren drivers, on what was a tremendously positive weekend for the British team.
As Piastri explained, “if you don’t get your qualifying laps spot on you pay the price and that’s what happened to me this weekend. Things are so tight that the slightest mistake can cost you a couple of grid positions and that puts you on the back foot for the race. The rest is just a consequence of that. Today I don’t think there was too much we could have done on my side – I’m pretty happy. So close to a podium but it will come.”
ALONSO’S POST-RACE penalty (read sidebar) promoted team mate Lance Stroll to sixth place and helped Yuki Tsunoda get up to P7, a result that put Racing Bulls ahead of the sensational Haas team in the championship and was just reward for the tremendous job the young Japanese did all weekend – on top of paying him back for the lack of luck he had in the first two races of the season.
Clearly faster than Ricciardo the whole weekend, Yuki qualified eight ahead of both Aston Martin drivers and Hamilton (!) but the position lost to Stroll at the start cost him two extra points at the end of the race. Undercut by Hamilton after very early stops for the midfield bunch, the young Japanese kept his cool, and managed to keep his tyres alive for half the race, but the attempt to undercut Stroll failed by little, being stuck behind Gasly at the crucial moment being a blow to his chances.
Nevertheless, Tsunoda’s speed and consistency earned him six valuable points and even an unusual compliment from Helmut Marko, who said “Yuki drove flawlessly from the first lap on Friday and set very, very consistent and very good lap times in the race today. When Hülkenberg attacked, he countered immediately. I think that’s confirmation that Yuki is an absolutely mature Formula 1 driver.”
WITH PÉREZ having a lonely race for P5, the battle behind him was between Fernando Alonso and George Russell.
On different strategies – the Spaniard was one of only three drivers to start on the Hard tyre, using a Medium set in the middle stint to return to the Hard for the end, while the Mercedes driver did the more conventional Medium/Hard/Hard – they ended up meeting on track in the last 10 laps, after Russell did a late second stop.
For many laps the veteran kept his rival outside DRS reach but with five laps to go Russell broke into the ‘below one second’ gap and the battle was on. Being an old fox, Alonso was using his experience to keep the Mercedes driver at bay but went probably a bit too far one and a half laps from the end, a sudden speed reduction coming into Turn 6 catching Russell by surprise, with the youngster having an almighty accident from which he was lucky to emerge unscathed.
Russell immediately raised the possibility he had been brake tested and a late decision by the Stewards, after a lengthy investigation, confirmed his initial reaction.
In their ruling, the Stewards noted that, “telemetry shows that Alonso lifted slightly, more than 100m earlier than he ever had going into that corner during the race. He also braked very slightly at a point that he did not usually brake (although the amount of brake was so slight that it was not the main reason for his car slowing) and he downshifted at a point he never usually downshifted. He then upshifted again, and accelerated to the corner before lifting again to make the corner.”
In his defense, they wrote, “Alonso explained that while his plan was to slow earlier, he got it slightly wrong and had to take extra steps to get back up to speed. Nonetheless, this manoeuvre created a considerable and unusual closing speed between the cars.”
Going into a lot of detail, the FIA officials then considered that, “should Alonso have the right to try a different approach to the corner? – yes. Should Alonso be responsible for dirty air, that ultimately caused the incident? – no,” but then ruled that, “did he choose to do something, with whatever intent, that was extraordinary, ie lifting, braking, downshifting and all the other elements of the manoeuvre over 100m earlier than previously, and much greater than was needed to simply slow earlier for the corner? – yes by his own account of the incident he did, and in the opinion of the stewards by doing these things, he drove in a manner that was at very least “potentially dangerous” given the very high speed nature of that point of the track.”
1994 – It was 30 years ago this week – issue 599, ironically published on April 1 – that led with a ‘CAMS BOSS QUITS’ cover headline, outlining a power struggle at the motorsport governing body HQ.
The story, by editor Graham Smith, was something of a front cover departure from the normal racingbased headline and, despite the date, it proved to be absolutely correct. It read:
JUST OVER a year since he was heralded as the knight in shining armour who would turn CAMS around, former spy Sir Guy Boileau will quit the organisation. A short statement issued late last week claimed the reason for Boileau’s departure was the inability of both parties to arrive at a “satisfactory contract of employment.”
While the CAMS statement didn’t elaborate on the reasons for the failure to reach an agreement on an employment contract, it is believed that at the root of the problem was a loss of confidence in Boileau’s administration by the CAMS National Council who felt he was consulting less and less with it and the National Advisory Council.
Boileau’s style, insiders claimed, was to administer the CAMS National Office like the Army he was once part of.
His view, it is said, was that the national executive should make the decisions without consultation with the voluntary
1974
RACING FROM all over the country covered the cover of Auto Action 50 years ago.
Despite “entering probably his last year of motor racing” tireless Queenslander Lionel Ayres made a good start in his chase for the 1974 Sports Car Championship.
Ayres won the opening round in Adelaide in his Renmax Repco V8 after Robin Pare broke a rocker arm.
The Sports Sedans at Lakeside produced “some of the best racing in a long time” as John Goss and John McCormack battled hard. Goss managed to overcome McCormack after some “really hairy efforts”.
Auto Action’s own rally editor Roger Bonhomme took breakthrough win in the Division 1 Rallycross final at Calder Park after almost five years of trying.
committees and councils to which he was supposed to report. Not surprisingly, his approach brought him into conflict with the members of those committees and councils whose role it is to set CAMS policy.
There was also some concern at Council level on the way Boileau had interpreted the decisions taken on restructuring CAMS at the think-tank meetings early last year. It is claimed that Boileau’s version of the decisions taken at these meetings varied widely from that of the Council, to the extent that Boileau was taking CAMS in quite a different direction from that said to have been agreed upon. The split that began to appear after those think-tank meetings steadily grew into a gulf as Boileau pursued his own agenda without reference to the policy-makers and eventually became too wide to bridge. Facing a complete breakdown and with little chance of rebuilding the relationship, both parties agreed to a parting of the ways and Boileau will vacate his office at Camberwell on April 8.
Boileau’s departure is another set-back to the reorganisation plans for CAMS and the National Council now has to return to the employment market in search of another chief executive.
Initially it is planned that a temporary appointee replacing Boileau for the next three to six months will be made while the committee currently investigating the CAMS structure completes its work. Beyond that it is planned to appoint a manager for one to three years to oversee the implementation of the changes recommended by the committee, after which a permanent appointee will be made
1984
ALLAN MOFFAT ended Peter Brock’s blitz at the start of the 1984 Australian Touring Car Championship by taking a convincing win at Wanneroo.
After the #05 claimed the first two rounds, Moffat dominated from pole to win by 20s ahead of Brock and Dick Johnson.
One of the closest Formula 1 seasons ever kicked off at Rio where Alain Prost won the Brazilian Grand Prix.
But the Frenchman described the success as a “win by default.” Derek Warwick was “so far ahead at the time I would have been happy with second,” the Professor said.
As early as lap 10 Warwick’s Renault had already built a massive 30s lead only to retire. Others who failed to finish included Niki Lauda and Nelson Piquet, while Michele Alboreto led early before brake problems sent his Ferrari spinning into the catch fencing.
to take charge of the running of the National Office on a regular basis.
It is believed that the initial, temporary appointee may also be considered for a permanent posting once the initial phase is completed.
Boileau moved into the Camberwell office intially to investigate the operation of the National Executive after promoters threatened to withdraw their support for the organisation unless action was taken. In a move to head off the confrontation with the promoters, then Secretary General John Keeffe was sent off on extended leave.
Keeffe’s position was eliminated in July last year just before he was due to return, and Boileau was appointed to the position of chief executive.
Ironically Keeffe is now working as a real estate agent based out of offices across Burke Road from the CAMS office.
As a footnote, we can report that Sir Guy passed away in 2013.
ELSEWHERE IN the issue, Eddie Irvine was handed a one-race ban and US$10,000 fine for his part in a fourcar pile-up at the Brazilian Grand Prix. Involved in the melee were Martin Brundle, Eric Bernard, and a certain Jos Verstappen … While the FIA were going to take a further look at the incident, with a view to further sanction, Irvine’s team (Jordan) were planning an appeal.
2004
RICK KELLY announced himself as the “new kid in town” by taking an impressive maiden solo Supercars win at a wet Eastern Creek.
A smart move with the setup saw Kelly’s #15 Kmart Commodore fly from 17th to first to secure Holden’s 150th round win, while Mark Skaife and Marcos Ambrose shared the front row – but both struggled in the 67-lap race.
Off the track, Tony Cochrane announced Supercars first trip to Shanghai. China was however postponed until 2005 thanks to “logistical” concerns.
Formula 1 raced in Bahrain for the first time and it proved to be another venue for Ferrari and Michael Schumacher to conquer.
Having recently been involved in a punch-up with Aaron Senna, Irvine was concerned about the direction his career was taking:
“The problem is that I’m becoming infamous, not famous. First the Senna business, now this …”
Michael Andretti had won a bizarre IndyCar Gold Coast race, started two hours late because of a downpour and finishing in almost dark conditions. He led Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti over the line, with pole man Nigel Mansell ninth after a mid-race spin /stall.
2014
AS SUPERCARS raced in Tasmania, the paddock was swept up in Team Penske rumours, causing a commotion by confirming interest in joining Supercars.
In an exclusive interview, Tim Cindric confirmed that Marcos Ambrose was the driver they wanted but it was no guarantee that Ford would be its partner.
On the track, Triple Eight clean swept Symmons Plains, but not without incident after Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes famously clashed at Turn 6.
Lowndes was worse off, dropping to eighth as Whincup claimed the first of back-to-back wins.However, Lowndes hit back to win the 84-lap main event on Sunday.
Over in Malaysia, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg gave Mercedes a first 1-2 since 1955. Daniel Ricciardo was fighting for third before his race spiralled into retirement following a botched pit stop.
Will Power started 2014 on top by winning the St Pete IndyCar opener.
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