Australian Jason Bargwanna took a strong grip on the NZV8s championship when he won his race at Taupo today.
The V8 Supercar driver started the penultimate round of the series just 12 points ahead of young Kiwi Martin Short but is now 87 points in front as Short was forced to retire with a mechanical problem in his Toyota Camry.
Short, from Hamilton, had qualified on pole but Bargwanna made a slightly better start and pulled slightly ahead on the outside. The Kiwi, trying to hold him off, went too fast into the first corner and ran wide, allowing Bargwanna and Cambridge driver Nick Ross – both in Holden Commodores — to duck through on the inside.
Bargwanna felt he had pressured Short into making the mistake. “I had to dig deep into the bag of tricks,” he said.
Short later passed Ross and started to close the gap to the leader, but then his car began to smoke and he pulled into the pits. Ross finished second and Short’s new team-mate, Timaru driver Brent Collins, came third first time out in the Camry.
Bargwanna said he was saving his best tyres for tomorrow’s feature race, which carries the Jason Richards Memorial Trophy. He was a friend of the popular Kiwi driver and replaced him at Brad Jones Racing when Richards’ cancer forced him to stop driving.
“That’s why it was so important for me and the team when I won the trophy last year,” Bargwanna said.
In spite of his substantial points lead Bargwanna is taking nothing for granted.
“It just takes one DNF [did not finish] to change everything,” he said. “And our car still has a recurring electrical problem that we’ve not been able to fix.”
While the fast new-generation cars mentioned above dominated the race, Turua teenager AJ Lauder extended his lead in the Gold Star TL category for the original-specification NZV8s by leading all the way in his Ford Falcon.
His brother Brad held second for a time but dropped back as Hamilton’s Bronson Porter (Commodore) took second and Aucklander Todd Pelham (Falcon) came third.
In the Jason Richards Memorial Trophy race the original cars start in front of the new ones, and the new cars have to make a pit stop to change a wheel. A fast pit stop could be the key to victory – but the older cars are in with a real chance of overall victory.
Formula Ford rookie James Munro took the lead in his championship after just getting the better of a tough battle with former leader Brendon Leitch from Invercargill.
The 16-year-old Christchurch driver led Leitch narrowly for most of the race till Leitch just managed to squeeze through under braking at the end of the main straight. But straight away Leitch missed a gear-change and Munro was back in front.
Munro revealed that he had been suffering from a nasty stomach bug. “But I don’t think it had too much effect in the race,” he said. “Once I was focused I didn’t think about it.”
The Formula Ford championship wraps up with two more races tomorrow, while the final round for the NZV8s is at Pukekohe’s V8 Supercar meeting in mid-April.
