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October 07, 2024

2024 Round 3 - Phillip Island 4-6 Oct - Round Up

ROUND 3 PHILLIP ISLAND 4-6 OCT - ROUND-UP

Well there is a saying in motorsport, “It ain’t over till it’s over”, and this round was a great example of that saying. We had rain, sun, greasy track, hail stones, sunburn…..and that was just on the Saturday!.....but overall a great weekend of motorsport, at one of the best tracks in the country.

A big congrats to Julian Newton in his Radical for taking out the round win, he was literally one of very few drivers that kept his nose clean, didn’t cop any penalties and stayed out of trouble! Jason Makris came into the round with a healthy points lead but struggled a little over the weekend with car handling in wet conditions, dropping him down the points score.

JP is hot on Jmak’s tail but was penalised after race 1 for BOP breach, dropping him down the point score order.

A couple of the drives of the weekend (of which there were many) would have to have been both Tom Hughes and Paul Trengove. They both made very brave moves, in the wet around the outside of Turn 1 and Turn 2 respectively and made up some great positions.

Our flying Englishmen, Miles Lacey, returned to Oz to steer the Praga and was in the hunt to take the weekend until a BOP penalty saw him also drop down the points, Ross Poulakis in the sister Praga had electrical gremlins but still netted some valuable points for the round. After Mile’s penalty for R2, Tom Hughes was bumped up to P1 and started R3 in pole!

Mr consistency, Mark Lauke, was exactly that, consistent all weekend, but did manage to find some wet grass that jumped out in front of him to spin on – a coupe of times, but thankfully kept the car straight.

One of the highlights for this round was the return of our AP3 cars (motorcycle engines) where we had four cars in the class With Paul Trengove (West WR1000), Phil Andrawos (Firman F1000), Mark Short (Prince LSR) and Terry Peovitis (Wolf Thunder). This class was hotly contested all weekend and had some absolutely awesome racing – proof that you don’t have to have the fastest and most expensive car in the series to have the most fun and be quick! As previously mentioned, Paul made some wild moves around the outside, and made them stick! Phil also had some great battles, Terry stayed out of trouble and as mentioned above Mark’s extremely quick beast was churning some distinguished lap times.

NEW LAP RECORD ACHIEVED AT PHILLIP ISLAND 6/10/24

South Australian Mark Short in his first outing with APS since he has installed a turbo to his motorcycle engine car which is home built and based on an old formula ford chassis did a fastest lap of 1:26.15. As we are sure you will agree, this is an extremely respectable time set and Mark was in the running for a win except for the fact that his gear shifter failed and he headed for the pits for a quick fix before returning to the circuit to finish the race further down the order.