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We went racing! What a
great result! |
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It was getting close to the end of the six hours. Michael Downard was driving the last stint. We were doing well. We had stuck to our race plan and each driver had driven close to, but not below, his nominated lap time. Each driver knew that even an improvement of 0.1 of a second on his nominated lap time was going to cost the team a one lap penalty. Our goal of achieving a podium position for an outright place seemed a bit elusive. But we were hanging in there, sticking to the plan! Practice and qualifying on Saturday had shown that there were quite a few cars capable of running times below 1:40:00. Mark McNamara had put in a few good times in the 1:38's, but this was an endurance race and the cars and the drivers had to last. What we wanted was some high speed consistency from the Drivers and reliability from the Cars. At the end of the practice and qualifying sessions, but before 5.00 pm on Saturday, we had to submit our nominated lap times for each Driver. To have a chance at outright, we had to have a time that would be quick. But to have a chance at handicap, we had to have a time that each driver could drive very close to, but not exceed. The penalty of one lap per infraction was severe. So it was a balancing act. Weather was also a factor. Saturday had been a perfect spring day. The temperature had hovered somewhere around 20C. There hadn't been a cloud in the sky all day. Coming out of an overcast Melbourne on Friday, it was one of those perfect blue skies you dream of seeing. Selwyn Hall and Greg Aimers were handing out the sunblock. We were getting sunburnt! If it stayed like that for Sunday, then our nominated times would hold up. If it looked like rain then, we had the chance to nominate slower nominated times for each driver. Driving west to the Team Dinner at the Kim Wah on the Saturday night into the setting sun and cloudless red sky, I knew we didn't have a problem, Sunday's weather would be a repeat of Saturday. And so it was. But by now there were only 30 minutes left in the race. The five hours and 30 minutes that had gone before seemed to have vanished like raindrops on hot concrete. But our team of club officials Greg Aimers, Mary Blecher, Selwyn Hall, Gordon Robertson, Gordon Sutherland and Mike Williamson were somewhat despondent. No one appeared to be giving us credit for our performance. The track side announcer it seemed was more intent on reporting the performance of the more "experienced" teams like the Mini Club entries, the Alfa Romeo teams, the Sports Car Owners team, Austin Healey Sprite Team and PIARC/Porsche. As newcomers we didn't rate much of a mention. In fact each time Michael Downard appeared in his beautiful black 928 GT he was greeted by "Here's that big black Porsche, taking up all of the track again!". Nonetheless we were in there with a show ... track side announcer or no! We had started the day with a target of 211 laps. Based on our nominated lap times for each driver. The organizers used these to calculate a theoretic number of laps each team would complete over the six hours. Very simply, they divided the number of drivers in each team into the six hours, to come up with the maximum period of time each driver could be on the track. If the driver exceeded that time, then a penalty of 23% would be levied against the time overrun or the additional laps achieved. For each driver the expected number of laps to be achieved was calculated by dividing the time the driver was to spend on the track divided by his nominated lap time. The sum of the expected number of laps for each driver gave us our total of 211 laps. Three other teams were ahead of us. The team with the highest number of expected laps was on 218 followed by another on 216 and a third on 213. We were fourth. There were ten teams behind us, with the team with the lowest number of expected laps on 193. Grid positions to start the race were determined by the expected number of laps to be achieved overall. So we were fourth on the grid.
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