Wakefield Park Round 2 - 2009  

Without sounding like a broken record, I really think that the car is getting better and better with each round. We had a few minor issues at Eastern Creek with did cost us overall, but looking on the brighter side, coming away from the round with 3rd overall could've be a lot worse.

So heading into Wakefield Park, we knew what we had to fix on the car ahead of giving it another shake down. The car was shipped back to Melbourne for a dyno after changing the manifold from round one. The power wasn't too much of the issue however usable power was. Friday practice seemed healthy, using 18 month old tyres, we were generally happy with how the car was running, however before heading out for the last session of the day, the car developed a misfire. It was quickly tracked back to the ECU having a problem with an injector driver.

The boys quickly located another unit back in Sydney so Paul 'Boppa' Bartolo and Cam 'Little Boppa' Glegg headed back to grab the donor ECU. In the meantime, Scott Fleming was performing open heart surgery on the unit that had just come out of the car to see if there was anything 'obvious' that might have come adrift. Nothing was found and as it turned out, we couldn't use the donor unit as we didn't have a laptop cable to transfer the tune from one unit to the other.

Fingers crossed, hopefully whatever Flemo was doing to the unit the night before would be enough to get us back on the track.

Qualifying: The track was cleared and the IP grid filed out onto the track for qualifying. I didn't get the memo that was sent out 'anag' saying that we must file behind the #77 RX7 of Brown until he decided that he wanted to pick up the pace however, everyone else did, so I proceeded to work my way around the slower cars and get on with the session. Circulating at around a 80% pace (still unsure if the ECU still had an issue) I was caught up by Doug Moss and Ryan Brown. Doug waited his turn and slipped past as you would expect, I mean, it was the second lap of qualifying, however it appeared that was something that Brown struggled to do, obvious to why he's still racing in Improved Production rather than moving onto a National Category. If I was looking for the next upcoming talent, I too would steer clear of someone who can't get around a slower car in qualifying.

Coming into the fish-hook, Brown slammed into the back of the RDM/Gatorz Eyewear RX7 firing me off the track at a great rate of knots. As I re-joined the track, it would appear that the contact with this clown had broken something in the gearbox as I began to struggle to select gears, the contact also had broken the fuel tank mounts. The call was made over the radio to stay out there and try to get some insurance laps in (we hadn't even had a flying lap at that stage). Returning to the pits, the decision was made to pull the gearbox out of the car and hope it was an easy fix with the chance we might not make the first race. Our race was a race against time which we lost once the gearbox was stripped down. It would appear that another trip back to Sydney was in order as the gearbox needed more than just a little fix.

Race 1: DNS

In an attempt to rub salt into the contact from Brown, Sue Brown (the apparent mother of Ryan) decided to walk down past our pit area with a stupid grin on her face, apparently rather happy to know we weren't able to compete and set about trying to stir up our crew. You'd seriously think that a family 'who claim to be heavily into their faith' would have better things to do than engage in High School games. Our pit area is the same area we have used for years and around 200-300 metres away from the Brown pit area. Very childish behaviour indeed but after the carry on they caused at the Nationals, nothing surprises me..

Race 2: Scott and Cam returned from Sydney in the early hours of Sunday morning with a healthier gearbox in toe. We quickly got the car back on the ground and fired her up for a 'rear of the grid' charge in race 2. Starting out of P33, we ended up finishing 6th after 12 laps around the Wakefield Park circuit. A decent salvage after missing a great deal of points the day before.

Race 3: Had a great battle for 2nd place with Doug Moss in the 120Y and Brett Morse in his RX7 on the opening laps trying to find a way around a very 'WIDE' Commodore of Baghdadi. On lap 3 I had a spin and slipped back to 8th position just before the skies opened up and the rain came down. Tippy-Toe was the call over the radio, not without another spin, I worked my way up to 4th with a lap to go. Flem notified me that we had one lap to go and the guy down the track in front of me (Doug Moss) was in 3rd position, he said that it's up to me, I can stay in 4th which was a decent result for the weekend or I could chase down Moss for the Podium.. We decided to chase down the turbo datsun and with 2 corners to go, we slipped into 3rd position and held on till the checkered flag.

Coming out of the weekend, the car was damaged and with a broken gearbox but we still managed to pull it together which is a great effort for our team. We could have blown up after the contact in qualifying but decided to let it slide and get on with racing. A massive THANK YOU to our team, Scott Fleming, Paul Bartolo, Cameron Glegg, Bryan Troy who worked their butts off all weekend to make sure I got back on the track. Also to Anthony Rodrigues for taking out the time for a last minute dyno session.

Next round is at Oran Park Raceway on May 29-30-31st, hopefully we'll have a better result to report.

Harmo