Racing & Sprinting

The 3 "MUCC Raker" teams finished the Philip Island 6 hour relay with cars in various states of disrepair.

The worst effort for the weekend was definitely by the Baby-Boomers team....
Dinta Officer made 2 trips back to the big smoke during the weekend - the first for a distributor cap and a rotor button, and the second trip for a new clutch - but still managed to get in enough laps to qualify for sunday and get in his requisite number of laps for the event.

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Simon Crane's new toy (some oddball European thing) failed very early in practice on Saturday with possible big-end bearing failure and had to resort to driving David McKenzies Lancer Evo.... in which he beat David's best lap time by a good 3 seconds! Whilst Mike Seidler tut-tutted his team-mates poor vehicle choices, he soon was removing his foot from his mouth as he desparately tried to keep the Civic running with a leaky headgasket. According to Mike, he didn't want to rev it too hard as it was leaking coolant and getting hot so he upshifted shifted early... ... at 6000rpm instead of the usual 65000RPM. As a result of all this drama, David McKenzie was forced(?) to continue to circulate on the track as the rest of his team desparately tried to keep their cars running.

Dinta started the sunday for the Baby Boomers in the $84 Galant.... unfortunately he only lasted a couple of lasts before the clutch gave up...

The Gen Xers fared better. Cale Pearce (Gen X) had ignition issues, and variously borrowed ignition leads and distributor cap from Old Farts Peter Otzen and Graham Pate in order to keep his Datsun 1600 running.
Chris Ballard and Matt Swan's vehicles held their own, with neither vehicle doing anything of note for the weekend (if you ignore the fact that Matt stupidly purchased new tyres on Sunday morning and subsequentially lapped 3 seconds faster than his nominated lap time fo the rest of the weekend - woops!). The highlight fo the XY's was definitely Jason Tan's shiny new 2009 Nissan GTR Skyline, which dutifully zipped around the track doing 1:55's... the fastest time you are allowed to nominate at this event.

Matt Swan on the front row in the 50 car grid.... shame he fluffed the start!

Amazingly, the Old Farts had the most reliable vehicles, and all 4 ran like clockwork all weekend. It is odd then that they should have come 3rd out of the 3 MUCC teams.... maybe their strategy was not as good as the younger folk... or was it that David Davies consistently lapped more than 10 seconds faster than his nominated time???

Graham Pate was first car on the track for the Old Farts...

Results:
1st: Excel Rally.com.au 7176.00 pts
2nd: MLC Racing 6758.67pts
3rd: Team PIARC 5868.00pts
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40th: MUCC Rakers XY's 311.29pts (C.Pearce / J.Tan / Ch.Ballard / M.Swan)
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42nd: MUCC Rakers BB's 294.42pts (D.McKenzie / D.Officer / S.Crane / M.Seidler)
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45th: MUCC Rakers OF's 124.32pts (Cl.Ballard / G.Pate / P.Otzen / D.Davies)

Full results here.

Thanks to everyone that made the weekend a great weekend of club level motorsport.
In particular thanks to Mike Seidler for ensuring our entries made the cut by compiling all the documents so our entries could be submitted within 24 hours of entries opening!

matt