Everyone who entered the NaZCAR organisation’s 8 hour ‘Final Fling’ endurance race meeting at the soon-to-be-shuttered Pukekohe Park Raceway was a winner, reckons event organiser Dr Jacob Simonsen.
“Definitely,’ Dr Simonsen said from the circuit after the post-race prizegiving ceremony. “For a start we broke a couple of longstanding records at this track. One was for the largest field for a single race – 74 cars starting (originally we had over 80 teams, but some couldn’t make it due to the recent flooding and landslips up and down the country) and the other was for the most drivers registered for one race (221). Just quietly I reckon we’ve also topped the ‘Most Laps ever’ in one race, with 13,329…”
“By opening up the entry criteria while at the same time sticking with a relatively high lap-time threshold we were able, explains Dr Simonsen, to assemble one of the most diverse, eclectic mix of cars, station wagons, utes and specials ever seen at a race meeting here, let alone lining up to contest the very same race as this lot was about to do at Pukekohe Park Raceway last Sunday.
Race they did too, hard and fast all day. So who ‘won?’
Dr Simonsen gives the distinct impression that he knows, but isn’t going to say, instead reiterating his main reason for setting up and running the ‘Final Fling’ event in the first place.
“The key idea was to give teams of two or more drivers with fully race-prepared budget to mid level production-based road/race cars, an opportunity to cut as many laps of the Pukekohe Park Raceway as they could fit into 2 x 4-hour stints before the place shuts down for good in a little over a month’s time.”
“Sure, some of the teams did better than others, but – in all seriousness folks – that’s not what this particular event was about, especially coming so soon after ex-tropical cyclone Gabrielle cut her destructive and – we now know – deadly, path down through the North Island.”
“So,” says Dr Simonsen, “to sum up I’d like to offer my heartiest of congratulations to all the teams that managed to turn up, start, cut some laps, and finish (or any combination of the above), and my deepest commiserations to those who had entered the event but not made it to the track thanks to storm damage of some kind.”
Having been instrumental in setting up and trialling the 24 Hours of LeMons events in Australia from 2015, Dr Jacob Simonsen brought the franchise with him on his permanent return home to New Zealand, where he ran his first (non-continuous) 24 Hours of LeMons at Hampton Downs. The NaZCAR franchise now boasts the largest motorsport fields consistently gathered in the Southern hemisphere with their Lemons endurance events, the Pro Series (sanctioned National endurance championship) and now their latest ‘9 to 5’ offering.
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