After a big day of racing on Friday, we’re back into full swing on Saturday with this post.
The Mercury Motorsport-built Q-Scan R35 being piloted by Mark Hansen made the trip down from Brisbane to race at this event. They engaged the services of Tarzan Yamada to consult with and test the car. He managed to run a 1 minute 33 second lap, which is only a few seconds off the lead pace. Awesome for it’s first time attack outing! Reportedly, the R35 is running extremely well, the only potential improvement involving reducing understeer.
It looked like there was going to be some fierce rivalry between the Q-Scan R35 and the carbon-clad GT Auto Garage R35, being driven by Steve Glenney and Drew Schull. Both teams were running crazy aero but taking different approaches to how it was implemented into the car. The Mercury Motorsport team decided to stick with the standard body and add on carbon accents and mass aero for downforce. The GT Auto Garage team took an entirely different approach, pulling the entire $150,000 GTR apart and starting from scratch creating a mind blowing roll cage and finishing it off with a insane carbon shell. As you can see it isn’t the prettiest car, but function definitely takes precedence over form in this motorsport.
The all conquering HKS CT230R Evo was out on show, however the car has been retired from competitive racing for some years now. Awesome, nonetheless.
One of the crowd favourites of the event, the Panspeed RX7. Easy to see why it has such a big fanbase.
Last year’s champion the Sun Racing/Cyber Evo was back out again. Up until the early sessions of the Saturday it was in the lead, beating its own track record by 0.2 seconds on its second time out for the weekend.
The Scorch S15 was one of the most eagerly anticipated racecars coming from Japan. Thus far, it has managed a 1 minute 34 second lap. Nothing to sneeze at, considering its humble beginnings!
The infamous Hi Octane Racing R34 driven by Mark Berry was back again this year, after having a terrible weekend at the 2010 WTAC. This year they stepped it up a notch on the aero, as did many teams that returned for another crack at the Cyber Evo’s crown. The car was definitely on pace but currently not enough to touch the big guns only managing a best of 1:35 as of mid-Saturday-morning.
The Revolution FD RX7 was probably one of the most anticipated cars of the event, due in part to its blistering lap that it set on the famous Tsukuba Circuit in Japan. The Tsukuba lap record stands at 53.5 seconds, set by the HKS CT230R Evo. After standing for 4 years, the Revolution RX-7 almost broke the record. The RX7 did a monstrous time of 53.6 seconds, which is almost unheard of for a RWD car. To put that in perspective, the Cyber Evo’s best time on the circuit is a 54.5. So it is easy to see why everyone was dying to see it run on Eastern Creek.
The racing is currently being led by the Sierra Sierra, being piloted by David Emphringham: 1:29.02. Sun Cyber is close behind with a 1:29.70!
After the racing wrapped up, we got into some drifting. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the temperature plummeted, and the cars came out to slide. Details in the next post!
