The New Zealand Production Racing Championship reached the fourth of its sixth rounds at the tortuous Timaru Raceway last weekend and as is often the case at the South Canterbury venue, varying weather conditions played their part in determining who was successful and who wasn’t.
In the category for four-wheel drive turbo charged cars (Class E) Auckland’s Simon Sceats underlined that he is going to be hard to beat. His Subaru Impreza had the edge to the Mitsubishi Evo opposition, with Sceats taking two outright wins and Scott McKelvie the reverse grid race.
Class winners were: Sceats, Mark Joblin, Steve Taylor and Craig Innes.
Going into the Timaru round, Aitken led the championship by 9 points, but with Aitken slightly off pace at Timaru McKelvie now leads Sceats by 13 points with Aitken 26 points in arrears. Despite the relative lack of cars, the championship is one of the most tightly contested since its inception.
There was almost as much excitement happening off the track at Timaru as there was on. PRS officials met with their Motorsport New Zealand equivalents including General Manager Brian Budd and President Steve Kennedy.
Production Racing’s Mark Joblin and Lindsay Dodd were delighted to emerge from the meeting secure in the knowledge that the category has a firm future at the highest level of New Zealand motorsport in Tier 1. The category has a minimum commitment from MSNZ of three years continuation as it is.
“Motorsport NZ is 100 percent committed going forward, so to anyone building up a car
or considering building a car to race in PRS they can continue with the project with the certainty that the production racing concept has another three years to run at the very least,’’ said Dodd.
In other developments within PRS, Geoff Short has purchased the Brady Kennett Mitsubishi Evo 9, Tony Burrows is forging on the completion of this new Subaru Impreza WRX, while John Rongen, Andrew Fox and possibly Mike Modgill are set to return at round five at Manfeild.
