ATTWOOD BLASTS THROUGH DUST STORM TO LEAD THE CHAMPIONSHIP
- Saturday in-class heats throw out surprise winners
- Horan thunders into early Sunday advantage
- Langley wins Sunday enduro outright
The first round of the offroad racing national championship threw out some surprise results as Auckland racer Donn Attwood carved through thick dust to take the early championship lead.
Conditions described to me by spectators as racing through three feet deep sugar! - ED
The event, held at the 2010 Whitianga Festival of Speed, put the sport on show in front of several thousand spectators. Saturday’s racing remained the unpredictable lottery predicted by many, with some of the teams running new cars and engines enjoying top results and others starting their championship challenges with nightmare runs through the thick dust that cloaked the course.
Whakatane racer Clive Thornton, winner of the 2009 Asset Finance Taupo 1000, was making a debut run with a new race-tuned Chevrolet V8 engine in his Southern Cross class one car. His weekend started to go wrong when he rolled the big car during qualifying on Saturday morning for Sunday’s enduro.
His problems continued in the first race for the powerful unlimited class one cars. He hit a drop-off jump at the back of the 1.1 kilometre course at speed while leading on the first lap, and the car’s nose dug into the ground. The impact injured his back, breaking a vertebrae and bringing racing to a halt while the paramedics extracted him and his navigator from the car and brought them out to the road for transfer to hospital.
Also out to score early points but having a difficult run was 2009 production truck champion Anthony Hewitt, whose Dodge Ram 4X4 connected with Craig Patterson’s Isuzu when Patterson stopped on the top of the same jump that had claimed Thornton.
“I didn’t expect Craig to stop dead in the middle of the track and I just had nowhere to go in the dust.”
Hewitt also suffered a punctured left front tyre in one heat but recovered to stay in the hunt at the end of the first day.
Aucklander Donn Attwood and Papakura racer Nick Hall both had better fortune in the talc-like dust clouds that accompanied every race, Attwood winning races for the 23-strong Big Posters class three Super 1600 field and Hall dominating a smaller Richmond Autoworld class five Super 1300 category. Malcolm Langley split Attwood’s points dominance by winning the final heat for the 1.6-litre class. Multiple champion Tony McCall had borrowed Alan Butler’s Cougar Toyota Super 1600 for the weekend and led the first heat for the class but retired when an oil line split and caused a small fire.
McCall on fire - photo by Philip Hagan www.bigposters.co.nz
The owner of that car, Sandringham driver Alan Butler, was making his first competition appearance in his new American-built Millennium desert racer, and was pleased with progress after Saturday’s heats. Racing in the Southern Transmissions Limited top buggy class, Butler had the satisfaction of scoring a race win in the third heat, holding out six powerful turbocharged cars in the naturally aspirated 1.6-litre race car.
Glenn Turvey brought his newly acquired American-built Toyota pre-runner to compete in AFWE class four for sport trucks and won the class for the weekend; Bay of Plenty driver Pete Weatherly was likewise dominant in the AFWE Challenge Trucks.
The AFWE ThunderTruck class was not so easily won. The weekend started with Otakiri driver Gary Baker’s V8 Nissan Navara the only rear wheel drive entry against the more powerful sprintcar engined Toyota Tundra of series sponsor Clive George and the supercharged V8 four wheel drive Nissan Titan of South Head’s Raana Horan.
Despite having the smallest engine of the three, Baker scored a second and a win, missing second place in the first heat when his truck became bogged just before the finish line on the last lap.
Horan’s Nissan dominated, winning the other two heats to lead the class at the end of the first day.
The VW Shoppe Challenger class provided close racing, with Peter May doing battle through the Saturday heats with experienced racers Geoff Matich, Wayne Rowe and Shane Campbell.
Sunday’s enduro started as a Raana Horan benefit. Horan had taken pole position, all-important in the dusty conditions because it would enable him to race in clear air for the first part of the race. Behind him, Shayne Huxtable of Hawkes Bay was chasing hard, with Malcolm Langley moving through into third place. Attwood and Buchanan were fourth and fifth and Nick Hall sixth.
The thick dust proved the undoing of Huxtable as he lined up Horan’s Nissan Titan for a pass. Unsighted behind the big Nissan, he missed seeing a trackside corner instruction arrow and went off the track at high speed.
That brought the chasing pack into contention for the outright lead, though they would first have to close a gap of more than a minute to the flying Horan.
Neither Langley, Buchanan nor Attwood were able to make an impression on the Nissan’s lead, but Horan pitted with cooling radiators blocked with silt and allowed Langley to take the lead and begin a race-long battle with Attwood and Buchanan. The lead would change several times, with Buchanan taking his all-new Suzuki powered car past Langley.
“I wasn’t too concerned about letting James into the lead – I knew if I stayed within 20 seconds of him I could easily line him up and use the car’s power to get back in front.”
Attwood meanwhile was having problems staying in touch, finding his class three car harder to push through lapped traffic than the more powerful Bakersfield single-seater of Langley.
Behind the duelling front-runners, Nick Hall circulated in his less powerful class five Super 1300 car, mindful of having taken high points on the first day and hoping one of the faster cars would break.
Mechanical mayhem whittled the field to around ten cars as the race entered its closing stages. Mike Cox’s Jimco Subaru dropped out with a blown oil pipe, was able to fix it and refill the engine but then blew a rear wheel bearing. Alan Butler retired his new American car after a troubled enduro. Gary Baker’s big Nissan – the sole surviving ThunderTruck – lost four laps when a fuel pump failed, but was able to rejoin and put in two final fast laps to win the class. Warren Rogers’ class three car broke its cambelt and was out of the enduro, though he had completed enough laps to be classified a finisher.
But there were no such worries for the front four cars. Malcolm Langley took the enduro win and top points in class one; behind him Bu-Mac team-mates Attwood and Buchanan completed the top three ahead of Nick Hall and Hawkes Bay driver Dean Graham.
Hard luck story of the enduro belonged to Graham’s son Todd, who missed the cut-off by a single lap and was not classified a finisher.
The early championship lead belongs to Donn Attwood, with the next round for South Island drivers on April 24 at Nelson. The second championship outing for the North Islanders is in June at the tough Woodhill 100 endurance race northwest of Auckland. Attwood is a former winner of that race and could rightly consider it his “home” event.
Mark Baker
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