Can it really be four years since Auckland-basedlong-distance race event organiser and entrepreneur Dr Jacob Simonsen first announced plans to add a new ‘semi-serious’ Pro-Series to his other Lemons-based, long-distance offerings.
It certainly can. And this Saturday – (July 13) – Dr Simonsen and his small but by now vastly experienced group of volunteers will be in Taupo, doing the 101 things necessary for a multi-purpose motor race event like the first of now four 2024 NaZCAR Pro Series rounds to run like clockwork.
The second round of this year’s expanded series will then be held at Feilding’s iconic Circuit Manfeild Chris Amon on the last Saturday of this month, before returning north for the final two rounds of the 2024 Pro Series at the Hampton Downs circuit complex in the northern Waikato.
There the penultimate and final 2024 series rounds will be fought out on Saturday dates in the middle and at the end of next month (August).
Speaking from his new officec in downtown Auckland on Wednesday this week, Dr Simonsen said that he had been both ‘surprised and delighted,’ by the ‘overwhelmingly positive response’ to his original plan to put together a ‘slightly more serious sort of endurance race series for those with suitable cars’ to be run through the middle of the year.
Each of the three series run so far has broken new ground in some particular way.
For the first it was simply the format, with two distances – 3 & 6 Hours – with each lap-scored independently but run concurrently.
For the second year, meanwhile, Dr Simonsen broke some – very fertile – new ground by offering bona fide AASA New Zealand Endurance Race Championship titles to the overall series winners across all eight 3&6 Hour race categories, while for the third, last year, he made some subtle changes to the time ‘bands’ that split the diverse field of eligible cars into three main classes, as well as introducing the concept of the Firecracker 30 or 40-lap preliminary race.
This year’s NaZCAR Pro Series builds on both, with the big news the addition of a completely new, stand-alone series-within-a- series based around the first-up-best-dressed Firecracker first to 30-or-40 lap sprint races which this year will be run at each series round courtesy sponsors Kamo Parts and Teng Tools.
There are two classes (Rockets & Missiles) and at the final round of this year’s series (at Hampton Downs on SaturdayAugust 31) the series main sponsors, Kamo Parts and Teng Tools are planning a special, Last Man Standing promotion worth NZ$10K in its own right!
Dr Simonsen says that the demand for places on the grid has been increasing ‘steadily at first but ‘exponentially’over the past 24 months or so,’ since he first came up with the idea of a Pro Series as a way of givi ng some of the more serious competitors from his novelty 24-Hour endurance events something else to do with their cars through the long winter months.
Since kicking off his own involvement in motorsport in this country with the first wacky, budget-based ‘LeMons 24 Hour’ event at the Hampton Downs circuit in northern Waikato in 2016, the new budget car/driver-friendly 3 & 6 Hr. Pro Series, Auckland-based motor racing entrepreneur Dr Jacob Simonsen has created his own self-contained long-distance racing ‘world’ for ordinary, everyday Kiwis to enjoy.
The first step in that journey was setting up an alternative event sanctioning and driver licensing body to the incumbent, MotorSport NZ. That body, the Australasian Autosport Alliance (AASA) is a 100% NZ-owned agency of the Australian Auto-Sport Alliance, and has been successfully sanctioning, permitting, and licensing all LeMons, NaZCAR as well as Ultimate Rally Group (Targa NZ) and other motorsport events for the past six years.
The second step was to establish an ‘identity’ for the events he wanted to run here. From that desire came the creation of the distinctive NZ-focused NaZCAR brand plus the Pro Series, originally described as a ‘no-nonsense multiple distance/time endurance championship ‘without the silly themes/penalties of a typical LeMons-style event.’
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