Race report
The final round of our tour was moved to Palmerston North following a string of rain offs and interruptions through the season. We were happy to be back at the track that had treated us so well this season.
We would run three heats for qualifying then a feature to finish the night.
We had a solid lead in the OST points but needed another clean night to round out the season.
We drew grid 7 for the first race and got off to a reasonable start however on the slippery track I made a little error and caught the fence damaging our rear suspension. We carried on but not at great pace and lost some spots to finish about 10th.
It was an easy enough fix for the next race and we were back out with our car tuned up but a lot of work to do starting back in 15th. We got a killer start and sliced through cars left and right through the opening laps before the field spaced out a little and it got more difficult to pass. By the end we made our way up to fifth which helped to make up for our bad first heat.
Second heat we started off 2 and got off to the lead. We quickly caught the back of the big field and worked our way through lapped traffic albeit a little too cautiously as it turned out as we lost the lead in the last lap after dodging a spinning car in front of us. We hung on for second but it was a little bit what could have been. The results qualified us sixth for the feature and gave us a lot of work to do on the very slick track.
We fired off in the feature okay, getting the setup where we needed it early and made some ground up the field. However our progress stalled about mid race once our rear tires began to give up and we were stalled at fifth spot. While it wasn’t an amazing nights racing for the team it was hard to balance being cautious for points versus attacking for the race win. On final count we had done enough to win the series, with none of our close competitors taking any points off us in the final round. It would be our second OST tour win in three seasons and a great reward for our resilience through the season.
Our next round is to be at Stratford speedway for the third attempt at getting the Grand Prix meeting in. Hopefully we can score another weekend of dry weather and challenge for another win in the naki
