Hidden Valley Round 3
I think it’s fair to say round 3 of the Australian V8 Ute championship was a character building experience for the entire Ice Break Racing team.
Firstly I apologise for my weekend report being a little bit late. After minimal sleep over the weekend followed by issues getting home with the ash cloud affecting a lot of flights, things have been fairly hectic!
I’m happy to say the hats and prize packs have been sent out today express post so everyone that won the draw should see them in the next few days.
The weekend started off pretty well. We rolled the Ice Break Holden out of the Mack Race Transporter and it showed its speed straight away. We topped the time sheets in practice two and carried that form into qualifying posting the second fastest time.
I got hung out wide into turn one after starting on the front row for race one, but slotted into 3rd place. I was driving a bit conservatively and sat in 3rd to the end of the race. Race two was a bit more eventful than the first! It was the reverse grid race for the weekend and the top 25 Utes got flipped. With some people receiving penalties after race one I moved up a couple of spots and started 19th. We had some good pace again and I was making my way through the field. With my main competition behind me our round points were looking good. Grant Johnson was sitting behind me with about 2.5 laps to run. He thought he had the better of me into turn 5 and lunged down the inside. Unfortunately for me he out braked himself and locked the rear wheels and slid sideways into me, spinning me around the corner. The worst had yet to come! Two Utes following had nowhere to go and clipped the front of my Ute as they went past ripping it apart! There were parts spread all over the track. We limped around to make the finish and gain any points we could. This was a pretty tough situation for everyone involved as our championship hopes had taken a big knock back and we weren’t sure if it could be repaired for Sunday. Grant and I had raced side by side at Barbagallo without touching for over half a lap. These things happen when we are pushing 110% in a reverse grid race. There were a number of people including supercar teams that didn’t think it was possible to fix the Ice Break Holden over night. I guess that made us all hungrier to get the job done. The support we received from people wanting to help by donating parts and other things we needed was unreal. The first issue was finding a panel shop to fix the chassis rails on Saturday night. We were very fortunate to meet Simon from Streamline Collision Centre who was happy to help. After the chassis rails were straight the boys started to fit the spare engine. The Ute was running again by around 4am then it was a matter of fitting all the panels and doing a set up. The guys did an awesome job and we rolled the Ute off the scales minutes before race 3 on Sunday morning. It was a pretty cool feeling for IBR when we rolled took a grid position for R3. The support people offered through our Facebook page carried our team through the night to get the job done.
We moved up a couple of spots in race 3 but it was a challenge. There was a fault with the new power steering pump and it was pumping inconsistently so the steering would get extremely heavy then free up when the power steer kick in again. It was a good result to hang on for 9th place although my arms were a bit sore after that!
We started the final from grid 9. The power steering was fixed and we pushed on. We moved up to p6. It was obviously a disappointing weekend but the teams never say die attitude and passion pulled us through the tough situation to hold a position still capable of winning the championship. We dropped back to 4th on the series leader board but we are only 17points adrift of the leader. After a very long and tough couple of day - some of the team had been up for 47hrs straight - it wasn’t time to go to bed! We headed to the after party to celebrate. We overcame a tough and disappointing situation to salvage a result so I’m lucky to have an awesome group of people in our team that was willing to go the extra mile and great supporters at the track and on Facebook giving us motivation as well.
I’m now looking forward to Townsville. We had some bad luck there last year but had good speed so I plan to bounce back with a solid result at round 4!
Thanks for your support,
Chris #42
