Tony Quinn and Garth Tander have snatched a dramatic win in the Highlands 101 endurance race at Cromwell today.
Quinn and Tander, driving an Aston Martin Vantage GT3, were trailing the AMG Mercedes-Benz SLS GT3 of Richard Muscat and Craig Baird heading into the final lap when with just a few hundred metres to the finish the leaders ran out of petrol.
Baird and Muscat, who had led for more than 90 of the 101 laps, ground to a halt before the finish line to become one of 14 cars that did not finish. The incident robbed Muscat of three-straight victories over the weekend after winning the final two races, and the title, in Australian GT Championship yesterday.
Victory in the 101-lap race was Quinn’s second after he combined to win last year’s inaugural event with Fabian Coulthard in the same car and his third 101-style endurance win after victory in the Phillip Island 101 earlier this year. Tander meanwhile broke the Australian GT class lap record three times today with the new low time now 1min 31.716secs.
“Right now, I’m delighted and honoured to share the drive and the win with Garth,” said Quinn who owns the Highlands Motorsport Park complex.
Of the last lap win, Tander said: “The guys radioed me to say keep an eye out for the Merc, it’s going really slow. Coming out of the hairpin going up to the bridge, it wasn’t going at all, so I was yee-hahing on the radio as I went past and that was it. We were actually battling the Merc quite a bit after the earlier pit stop and we were close to going a lap down, but by staying on the lead lap and keeping the pressure on them, they pitted a lap before we did and that was the difference to buy us enough fuel to the line.”
Quinn and Tander’s winning time was 2hrs 51min 9.7sec and they were 12.4secs ahead of the second placegetters, Rod Salmon and Nathan Antunes, who were driving an Audi R8 LMS GT3 with the Lamborghini Gallardo FL2 GT3 of Steven Richards and Justin McMillan third 1min 16secs back. These three were the only competitors in the 34-strong field – which featured supercars worth nearly $20 million – to complete the event’s 101 laps.
“This is my favourite track by a long way now!” said Salmon. “What really put us where we were on the track to start with was the running race. Nathan promised me he’d be the first runner – he was third – but coming from 16th on the grid after qualifying, we went out on to the track well-positioned in third.”
Fourth was another Audi R8, driven by Peter Fitzgerald and Michael Almond, but they were two laps down and just ahead of the 7.9 V8 Chevrolet Camaro of Inky Tulloch – the first Kiwi home – and Craig Lowndes. Rounding out the top three placings for Kiwis were Danny Whiting and Andy Knight in a Porsche 997 and Andrew Bagnall and Anthony Pedersen also in a Porsche and they were 14th and 16th overall respectively.
The V8 Bentley Continental GT3 – the first of its kind to race in the Southern Hemisphere – was one of the non-finishers, retiring after 55 laps while another top pairing, Shane Van Gisbergen and Klark Quinn in the McLaren MP4-12C GT3 were forced out with gear selection issues after just 28 laps having led some of the early stages.
Meanwhile the 1+01 one-hour-plus-one-lap mini-enduro saw Christchurch’s Paul Kelly and Auckland’s Daniel Gaunt take the win in a Porsche GT3 ahead of Aucklanders Gerald Trass and Jono Lester in a Ferrari 458 and Queenstown’s Grant Aitken in another Porsche GT3.
The weekend’s attractions also included Kiwi drift star “Mad Mike” Whiddett drifting at Highlands for the first time, aerobatics displays and precision sky-diving.
Best estimations of the Highlands’ team regarding the weekend crowd for this year’s Highlands 101 are that it exceeded the approximately 25,000 who attended the inaugural 101 endurance event last year.
