Careful on that ladder Eugene, she’s a tad broke

The 2019 Castrol Toyota Racing Series will return to Highlands Motorsport Park in the South Island and will not start at Ruapuna as it has done for the past few years.

TRS will run on the Central Otago circuit’s full 3.9km layout including the bridge. The switch leaves Canterbury Car Club’s prestigious Lady Wigram Trophy in limbo as the club requires that it be raced at Ruapuna.

That’s a pity, because the LWT has some super-famous names on it and is an integral part of New Zealand’s motor racing heritage. One of the aspects of TRS that has consistently blown away the kids who come here each summer from Europe and Asia and the USA is the prospect of having their names inscribed on trophies that bear the names of some of the most iconic drivers in the sport: Brabham, McLaren, Rosberg, Hill, Moss and more.

So far, TRS is silent on what trophy will replace the LWT for the Highlands round.

There will again be three races per round and the remainder of the five-round calendar is unchanged from 2018, with the finale the 64th New Zealand Grand Prix at Manfeild’s Circuit Chris Amon.

Entries for CTRS 2019 opened recently, with Pukekohe’s Liam Lawson indicating he is likely to pull together a package to race.

Russian Robert Shwartzman won the 2018 title after a dramatic finale in which long-time points leader Marcus Armstrong crucially lost several positions at a late restart. Armstrong, currently racing the 2018 FIA European Formula 3 Championship in Europe, has indicated he is not likely to return to contest the championship.

With the FIA continuing to develop the F4-3-2-1 career ladder, and with even F4 adopting the Halo drive protection system there is little to be gained from spending $200,000 or more to race the summer here in cars that now bear less resemblance to the FIA’s structure of tiered championships.
So where does that leave New Zealand? With a dysfunctional career ladder.

For 14 years, TRS has been the ultimate on-shore test for young drivers who aspire to race overseas. Whether they wanted to pursue a single-seater career (Brendon Hartley, Richie Stanaway) or to race tintops (Shane van Gisbergen, Dan Gaunt, Jono Lester) or both (Earl Bamber, Nick Cassidy, Chris van der Drift) the rising Kiwi stars knew that contesting TRS gave them the skills and race-craft they would need to go wheel to wheel with the best overseas.

For some time, under Steve Boyce, TRS offered track-tests and assistance to each year’s winner of F1600. Formerly Formula Ford, this is a step down from TRS in every sense. No aero, cookie-cutter tyres, ancient Kent ohv engines that explode with monotonous regularity. The irony of a category that uses (old) Ford engines but is shunned by Ford NZ is exquisite. Ford stopped backing Formula Ford a couple of decades back, and the name just hung around to recognise that the category will used the Kent four-banger. The step up to a modern composite chassis, run by proper teams and with proper race engineers, was often a bit much for our young hopefuls. But that’s part of the process – only those who are best fit for the white-hot bump and grind of international motor racing should emerge from TRS honed and ready. For the others – well, we have a thriving endurance scene and any number of other ways to race – even the banger-racing categories are popular these days.

Step down again from F1600 and what do we find? Formula First, closely controlled VW 1200cc flat fours in tube chassis. Good close racing, lots to learn for kids coming up out of karts and getting used to the feel of a full-sized race car, speeds low enough that it’s rare for people to get in too much trouble. And yet, again, the ‘Firsts’ are really no breeding ground for TRS stars. The speed differential between a First and an FT50 is a yawning chasm and then there’s the aero to grapple with, the F3-spec Michelin slick tyres, the F3-spec braking package, the cornering forces, the speeds-in-gears on the way to a top speed of 225 km/h or so vs the Firsts’ top-out at 155 or thereabouts on a good day with a tail wind. Lots of drivers settle into the Firsts and go no further, and that’s fine.

Weirdly, a tin-top single make category is one of the bright spots on the career ladder. Shouldn’t be, because conventional wisdom would say a tin-top dulls the reflexes and takes the edge off the spatial awareness that is so hard-won in open-wheelers. But Geoff Short’s stewardship of the Toyota 86 Championship over the past few seasons has brought it to a point where it provided all but one of the Kiwis in the 2018 TRS with their most relevant racing experience before jumping into the close confines of an FT50 cockpit.

One of those drivers was Marcus Armstrong, widely regarded as our brightest talent in single seaters at the moment.

The grids are growing (in fact at the end of the 2017-2018 year Geoff had no additional cars available for racers who might be keen to take part – time to build some new cars!), the level of professionalism is rising (witness the return of International Motorsport and the strength of the CareVets two car team this year), and the drivers who are coming through from other categories are faster and more focussed on their careers than ever before.

Karting – always the start point for young racers whatever their intended career path – continues to provide the bulk of those who end up racing TRS.

In fact there are a few who come directly from karting to TRS – a heck of an adjustment and one that sorts the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. Though there are those in Kartsport who insist that it is a career in and of itself, there is no denying the fact that 70 per cent or more of the young racers who come into karting do so to get the grounding they need before ascending into the premier categories.

Whether Kartsport acknowledges it or not, it’s the breeding ground of future TRS talent, and it does a very good job of honing the talents of the youngest racers.

So where does that leave us?

With a ladder of two working rungs: rung number one, karting, is solid. Rung number five, TRS, likewise provided it continues to remain relevant to the FIA categories. Somebody nailed the 86 Championship in the middle and that’s all good for now. But the rotten rungs need fixing. Perhaps the way to do that is to let Formula First become a club championship (which it really already is), and make F1600 into something a bit more 21st century. Either invite Ford to bring their lovely wee ‘A4’ 1.0-litre three cylinder engine over so the category becomes Formula Ford again (and in the process also Formula ‘Af-ford’) or invite F1600 to step down to club sport as well.

Yes, I know, the gasps and cries of sacrilege start here, now. But we need a faster F1600, one that slots in the middle properly and gives young drivers a first taste of aero and grip before they step up to TRS. We need a modern engine that gives drivers better reliability and thus lower full-season costs. We need an internationally relevant category specification.

How do we do that? A few years ago TRS tested demand for a TRS-lite category – detuned engine, slightly less aero and fixed aero parameters – with a couple of young drivers who were under age for the main category.

One of those drivers was Mitch Evans, who went on to do a bit of winning here and in Europe.

The cars were the previous TRS model, the FT40. Today, a full grid of those cars are mainly sitting around with nothing to do and minus their 2ZZGE engines. Five years after they were superseded by the FT50 they are well and truly depreciated to club-level affordability should Toyota Racing New Zealand decide to unload them. Privately owned rolling chassis FT40s are worth $20-25k and there’s a complete FT40 ready to race on TradeMe at the moment for $36,000. So how hard would it be to slot a sealed engine and ECU – say, a 2NR-FE twin-cam out of the current Corolla – into those cars and make them into a TRS Junior category, closely controlled but sold directly to the people who will race them.

Only TRNZ and Toyota’s bean counters know for sure, and it would swing on their willingness to do even more in motorsport than they currently are. A big ask, given that no other motor manufacturer/brand has done what they have done or spent what they have spent to make Kiwi motorsport great again.