Club Track Day at SMP Amaroo - Round 9

13 July 2019 / Words by Joe Kovacic, Photos by Rob Wilko & Joe Kovacic

A damp and foggy winters day greeted 70 enthusiastic motorsport competitors for Round 9 of the 2018/19 Club Track Days at SMP Amaroo Circuit on 7th July 2019. Welcome to all four of our nervous first timers. With the fog being so heavy the Clerk of Course only allowed untimed practice for the first session until the fog finally lifted. Despite the delayed start, the six run groups still managed to get four timed sessions with some drivers getting 27 timed laps.

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Unfortunately, we had one major incident involving an MX-5 hitting the wall between turns 14 and 15a after dropping a wheel off the track. Luckily the driver is okay but his car had to be towed away. We had another incident involving two cars coming together at turn 6. A stern talk by our Clerk of Course was required reminding both drivers that it is a supersprint and not racing.

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The competitive battle continues in most classes. Congratulations to our two new members Barton Mawer and Andre Tan who shared Andre's Porsche GT3 rocket ship and set the fastest time of the day with a blistering lap of 1:00.32.

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Congratulations to our two fastest ladies Lizzy Ferme and Gaynor Lawler in laptimes of 1:08.17 and 1:10.01 respectively. Yuki Yu, Heather May Koorey and Lizzy Ferme set new Ladies Class Lap Records.

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Congratulations to Michael DeMao, Jamie Martin and Gus Elias for setting new Class lap records. There were very tight battles in classes 5, 7 and 10, with as little as 0.009s separating first and second place!

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A special thank you to my son Luke Kovacic for running the Grid Marshalling so well in my absence. Thank you to the numerous other officials and volunteers for another successful trackday. Congratulations to all the drivers on their results as follows.

Class 1st Place Time 2nd Place Time
1 Michael DeMaio 1:07.641 Craig Franklin 1:09.894
2 Bryan Shedden 1:06.083 Jason Atkins 1:08.447
3 Jie Ren 1:06.618 Yuki Chau Kam Yu 1:14.023
4 Jamie Martin 1:07.397 Daniel Bushell 1:10.137
5 Gerardo Martin 1:07.849 Matt Tarrant 1:07.922
6 Gustavo Elias 1:04.856 John Karayannis 1:05.969
7 Glenn Thomas 1:06.439 Keith Monaghan 1:06.603
8 Kristian Zadro 1:06.684 Christopher Lowry 1:10.377
9 Malcolm Steel 1:04.244 Martin Steel 1:04.671
10 Curran Brennan 1:02.359 Russ Maxwell 1:02.368
11 Barton Mawer 1:00.325 Andrie Tan 1:01.136

Click here for Rob Wilko's photo album (886 photos)

Click here for the full results