Northern drivers get 'a bit heated' at Meremere offroad race

2015 ENZED Offroad Racing Championship update

• Rollovers, crashes and a fire in incident-packed day
• Langley sprints to unlimited class win
• Strong turnout in youth category

The final northern round of the 2015 ENZED Offroad Racing Championship brought elation and disappointment in equal measure for the top championship contenders.

In a long day of short course racing at the All Terrain Racing Club’s Meremere track, six drivers amassed the maximum 72 points.

Three of the four truck classes saw drivers take the maximum: Cameron Taylor won class 2 for production four wheel drives and truck in his Nissan Navara; Te Puke’s Rex Croskery won class four for sports/improved trucks in his Toyota Hilux; Warren Adams won class six for Challenge trucks in his Nissan Safari.

Gregg Carrington-Hogg won class 9 with a clean sweep in his Chev-powered Baja; Paul Hussey won class 10 in his Edge Barracuda with four wins from four starts. Also taking the full 72 points in the youth category was Jackson Savage in the tiny but deceptively fast K-class Polaris.

For the first time, it was the youth Kiwitruck category that had the biggest entry in the championship.  The event attracted a record ten J-class entries in the youth category along with the new K-class Polaris and two M-class Kiwitrucks.

It was a tough day in class 8 for unlimited trucks and four wheel drives for Jono Climo who destroyed a front upright in the Kumho-backed JRC Toyota V8. Nick Leahy was making a ‘guest appearance’ in the same class driving the Camco Toyota Chev but broke the truck’s steering.

Multiple national champion Tony McCall broke his ENZED BSL Terra Chev’s steering in heat two for the Achilles radial-backed class one unlimited race cars. His crew repaired the car but he repeated the damage in heats three and four, nursing the crippled single seater home in fourth place in both those heats.  Tauranga’s Dyson Delahunty rolled his Polaris RZR 1000 in the U-class heats. Joel Giddy rolled his RZR on the same corner in the final U-class heat.

Devlin Hill rolled his class three single seater stadium car on the same corner that claimed the two UTVs. Brendon Midgely won three of four class three heats.

The overall win on the day and victory in class one went to Whakatane’s Malcolm Langley who capitalised on Tony McCall’s misfortune in the second heat. Langley was third in the first heat (won by McCall) then won the next three to maximise his points take from the day after pulling out of the previous round, the Woodhill 100.

Albany’s Raana Horan was only able to race three of the four heats in his Nissan Titan V8 due to business commitments. Nick Hall, who had harried Horan’s Nissan in his Toyota Chev Prolite all day, won the final heat for the class and posted fastest time of the day with a lap of 56.583 in heat three. Lap times had tumbled as the track dried out and the top trucks were under the one minute barrier even in the slippery first heat, while the big unlimited class race cars were unable to match Hall’s time, set in the closing laps of the penultimate class 8 heat.

The biggest drama in the class, though, befell Palmerston North’s William van der Wal, whose new truck caught fire in the middle of the third heat. Overheating transmission fluid had sprayed onto the engine block and exhaust pipe, causing the fire. Parked off the track, van der Wal at first attempted to put the fire out himself before marshals arrived to extinguish the flames.

The national championship final round will be held in November on a farm course in Hawkes Bay. The racing calendar was adjusted to enable competitors to also contest the sport’s flagship event, the NZ1000, in September. 

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Full event results are at: http://www.mylaps.com/en/events/1177630