The inaugural round of the V8 SuperTourers series kicked off at the weekend at the Hampton Downs Motorsport Park in the north Waikato. Experiencing these cars in race conditions was certainly an experience for Paul Manuell.
“What a wild car! They are so fast, have incredible adhesion and need to be driven at 11/10ths to get the knife edge result.”
The hot lap session on Saturday morning was also an experience when a local pukeko made contact with the ORIX Commodore and broke the driver’s side mirror.
ORIX treated over 300 people to their legendary hospitality on the weekend. Television commentator Jamie McCarthy was the MC for the appearance by the M3 Racing drivers Paul Manuell, Greg Murphy and Richard Moore, and also had the ORIX crowd’s attention with his own race commentary for the exciting third race.
After qualifying in fourteenth position, Paul was able to press forward to finish in eighth place even after receiving a tap in the rear from a fellow competitor. He continued his momentum in race 2 and finished in eighth place.
The 30 lap third race bore witness to the true potential of Paul and the ORIX Commodore as they had more pace than Craig Baird and Scott McLaughlin. After two safety car incidents, Paul and the ORIX Commodore were sitting in third and closing in on second. However, lady luck was not smiling and a drive belt failure caused the engine to overheat and go into limp mode. The team quickly took the drive belt from team mate Richard Moore’s retired Skinny Commodore and got Paul back on track. Unfortunately Paul was two laps shy of the required 75% of laps completed and was classified as DNF.
“I was very happy with the car’s speed by the end of the weekend. There was an amazing crowd at the track and at the ORIX hospitality marquee, and the feedback has only been extremely positive. It was an incredible weekend.”
The V8 SuperTourers certainly kicked off with a bang, with an estimated 28,000 attending the round. It was the biggest crowd that a domestic motorsport event has seen in years.
The M3 Racing team hosted three students from the Manukau Institute of Technology’s Motorsport programme over the weekend, showing a commitment to developing the motorsport crew of the future.
“Congratulations to M3 Racing team mate Murph on two race wins and taking out the round. He’s certainly set the precedent for the team!”
M3 Racing will use the next few weeks to consolidate their learnings from the three cars at their state of the art race shop in East Tamaki before hitting the track for Round 2 at Ruapuna over the Easter weekend.
“I’m really looking forward to Ruapuna in five weeks. I’m very familiar with the track and now finally have some SuperTourer miles under my belt.”
