The 2019 Castrol Toyota Racing Series looks set to return to the spectacular glory days that were interrupted by this year’s meagre 14-strong grid.
With driver confirmations currently at eight, there are a number waiting in the wings and loud noises coming from the rumour mill:
– Hunter McElrea, fresh from his $200,000 Mazda Road to Indy shootout win, is a prospect to grid up
– a second Aussie may join Thomas Smith
– Dan Ticktum rumours continue to swirl as he mulls the various appeals of the Indian MRF series, the Japanese Super Formula and TRS. He’s hunting SuperLicence points and TRS may be his best bet
– three of the four teams in TRS have drivers committed and only Bruin Beasley’s MTEC has yet to announce a driver or drivers
– Prema are rumoured to be looking at sending two of their three-man 2019 Formula Three squad down. I wonder who they might be?
-outside possibility, rumoured last year as well, is Mick Schumacher. This time the junior ‘Schu’ is fresh from winning the 2018 Formula 3 title – the final year that F3 cars will resemble our own TRS single-seaters.
With these commitments and a couple of others the championship can grid 16 cars, possibly even 18 or a full grid of 20. The latter is their limit, and that’s fair – if you’re in the rear quarter of that kind of grid then you have to be resigned to getting experience and raising your race-craft and race pace. Difficult to win from P15 or P16, and a dangerous place to be in terms of early lap incidents.
Speaking of incidents, the championship this year starts at Highlands Park, meaning there’s little relevant data available as the championship has only been there once. That was in the last year of the FT40 chassis and the drivers that year did their best to dispose of available stock with a string of crashes on that fast and unforgiving front straight.
Among media and pit crew there were gallows-humour jokes about ‘going canoeing’, especially when the rain came down in sheets. For the uninitiated, a canoe is a single seater that has lost all four wheels and is skating down the tarmac under its own momentum. Pass me that paddle!
The championship will run with the current cars for 2019 and the build programme is nigh complete – cars are testing at Hampton Downs today. After that, they will have to upgrade to a new Tatuus car with halo. The current FT50 cannot retrofit a halo because the tub was never designed for the shock loadings that would generate.
That means, like the FT40s before them, that they will either be mothballed or sold. Many of the original FT40 cars were sold to become school cars in Australia
Unrelated but relevant: the 25-car Formula BMW Asia race car fleet is also up for sale at the moment. The motorcycle-engined racers have been driven by Kiwis in the past but the championship slipped out of context with modern motor.racing and it ceased in 2013.
Meanwhile, the weekend’s on-track action at Pukekohe saw Aussie Jack Smith move into the lead of the BNT V8s Championship, notching up two wins and a second placing in his SCT Logistics/Supercheap Auto Holden Commodore.
The GT racing made the evening news when the Smith team’s Crawford Porsche had a spectacular explosion on the front straight, the engine destroying itself in massive sheets of bright yellow-orange flame.
The Toyota 86 grid was down by one car, but provided some of the closest racing of the weekend. This one-make category has to be the most successful New Zealand has ever seen, and it continues to attract top level young talent, acting as an incubator for drivers with an eye on Aussie, Asia or beyond.
With the 86s, TRS looking once more in good shape and the Daytona engines in the dealer-team Camry V8 racers, Toyota remains heads and shoulders about any other auto brand in terms of commitment to New Zealand motor racing. It’s lonely at the top.
Where then are Ford, BMW, Nissan, Alfa, Audi, Vauxhall, even Volvo? The first three have all been stalwart mainstays of touring car racing here in the past; the others are active internationally in the TCR category. David Oxton’s son Richard is currently on an extended working OE in the UK and has been engineering with Dick Bennetts’ West Surrey Racing team, which recently won the BTCC with TCR-spec BMWs.
If TCR arrives here, it’s a couple of years away – but if managed correctly could be more successful than the old New Zealand Touring Car Championship. In the process, it would give all these manufacturers and others a doorway into motor racing and would provide our domestic motor racing scene with a much needed booster shot of adrenalin.
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