After 3 weekends of racing in a row, it was the final round of the NZ V8 Ute Championship, at Pukekohe park Raceway over the Easter weekend.
I headed into the weekend 5th overall in the championship and was determined and ready to take my first V8 Ute win.
As we don’t have any practice on Friday, we were straight into qualifying on Saturday morning. I wasn’t 100% happy with how the ute was handling, but that was no excuse. I was disappointed with my efforts, as I was only able to qualify 8th place, even though this was still inside the top 10. I knew I could come forward in the race, I always do. I rolled ever so slightly forward on the start line and just as I braked to stop it, the lights went out! In the rush to get myself going I spun the wheels a little too much. Dashing to the outside of the backed up inside line, I held my ground and didn’t lose any track position. The two utes in front of me were absolutely going at it, rubbing each other, pushing and putting 2 wheels on the grass. I wasn’t as fast as them, but was able to capitalise from their mistakes and move forward. Once they had calmed down, one got back through and I finished where I had started in 8th place.
I worked with Dan my mechanic and Jake the team engineer as to where I felt the ute was vulnerable and its strong points.
We made some changes overnight and I studied my footage, track maps and took on board any pointers they could give me, I wanted to ensure I was getting every tenth I possibly could out of the car. I was starting from P3 for race 2 in the reverse top 10. I knew I could do it and this was my race to win. Getting a nice clean start I was patient and picked off the cars in front one by one. By lap 4 I was in the lead and broke away from the pack. However, my lead was being slowly being chipped away and 3 laps later one ute had caught me. I wasn’t going to make it easy for him, but I knew that I wanted to work with him, so the rest of the train didn’t catch us and we could fight for it later! He made silly mistakes and couldn’t get around me. Now with only a few laps to he was getting desperate. Reaching speeds of almost 200km/h up the back straight into a breaking zone, it came crashing to a halt, as he hit the back of my ute causing us both to spin. I turned into the spin and couldn’t give up yet, I still had 2 laps left to run! I cut my losses, pushed hard, and made my way back passed 2 utes. Crossing the line with a photo finish and was deemed 7th place by less than a tenth of a second.