A last minute cancellation of an overseas business trip allowed BT Motorsport to contest the inaugural round of NZ Time Attack held at Pukekohe Park Raceway over the weekend. An entry was made the night before the event, the car loaded up and a 4.30am start in order to make the grid on Friday morning! Between the unavailability for the first round, and a clash with our Summer of Thunder tour for the final round we decided not to contest this series, however after some initial success at the first round we are reviewing and juggling commitments in order to contest the entire series!
The NZ Time Attack series is a new initiative being run in conjunction with the D1NZ National Drift Series, which has an almost cult like following of loyal supporters. BT Motorsport were pleased to see that both competitors and spectators alike were embracing the new series and curious of the new cars on the scene, a positive sign for the future of Time Attack racing in NZ, which is extremely popular worldwide.
It has been around 18 months since BT Motorsport has been to Pukekohe Motorsport Park, which is an extremely fast and bumpy circuit which favours the brave. During the Friday practice sessions we were able to re-familiarise ourselves with the track and adjust the setup of the new car to suit. We were relatively happy with the setup of the car, only wishing for some more power as we were around 100kw down on the next least powerful car!!! With around 70% of the track being straights this obviously wasn’t going to suit us too well at all!
Saturday dawned and the weather was overcast with a few dribbles of rain… we were hoping for poor weather which would have favoured our lower HP car. Unfortunately the weather cleared and the sun came out. Running in conjunction with drifters meant that the track was fairly dirty, with a lot of rubber being picked up on our tyres. We made the decision to bolt on our new set of tyres and give it a decent crack!
We managed to pull just on 2 seconds out of our practice times, down to a 1.06.185 which we were extremely happy with, and which was good enough for 2nd in class overall! With a bit more bravery we are confident that another second could be pulled out of this time… which we will try and find out this coming weekend when we return to Pukekohe for the 4th round of our Summer of Thunder tour!
Best Regards
The BT Motorsport Team
Photos courtesy of MGN Inc and KAZ Photography
