5 September 2010
A cool cloudy day greeted the new race season with the opening race meeting for 2010. A small field assembled with stories of cars not quite ready and of others that had early season blues. Those that were able to race were assured of good points toward this year’s championship.

Qualifying was fairly uneventful with Colin Meadows in his Corvette leading the way with a competitive 1:04.3. Tony Van Tiel in the Falcon was next with Tony Gordon from Whangarei gaining third best time.

Paul Burnet in the very fast Torana XU1 suffered fuel problems as did Ron Findlay in the V8 Capri. Unfortunately this was the last we would see of the Torana.

Race 1 - The grid start race saw the cars race from start to finish in line with the times posted during Qualifying. Tony Gordon and Ron Findlay both had a good race with Tony Van Tiel for the minors but there was no stopping Colin in the C4 who took out race 1 by a comfortable margin.

All drivers found some race speed and improved on practice times by several seconds.

Race 2 - The organisers of the meeting declared the second race would be another grid start instead of the traditional reverse grid however we saw a lot more passing in this race in the earlier laps. Tony Gordon led for the earlier laps with another good battle with Ron Findlay and Tony Van Tiel.

The Corvette of Colin Meadows had a few slower laps early but then showed his class by overhauling all the runners on lap five.  He went on to win easily and was really starting to show the capabilities of the car. Tony Gordon was second with the Falcon of Tony Van Tiel third after another good battle with the Capri.

Race 3 - The afternoon seemed to get cooler as a light wind came but this seemed to assist the drivers as most posted their fastest times of the race meeting during this event. The handicap saw Steve Swann in the Torana SS lead the field away. It took six laps for Tony Gordon to catch him in the big 8 litre Chev and he took the win by just over a second from Steve with Colin Meadows really charging to make up a large deficit.

Colin set a fastest lap of the meeting with a scorching 1:01.9 which is his best time ever here. Ron Findlay’s Capri retired with a broken throttle cable.

The meeting was a fairly low key event as this was an early start to the season. We hope for a much bigger entry list for the next meeting which will be the two day ‘Thunder in the Park” meeting on 31 October at Hampton Downs.