710 Dominate on the Dirt!
710 Motorsport hit the dirt last weekend with the 6th and final round of Khanacross at the Maryborough track. A field of 45 cars lined up to tackle the track which evolved from thick gravel on Saturday morning to a clean clay surface by Sunday afternoon meaning drivers had to evaluate the grip levels on offer for every run of the weekend.
Defending 0-2300cc champion Shane Logan returned full of confidence after a successful test session just 2 weeks ago. The few gremlins that had crept in during the re-build earlier this year had been remedied and the car was super fast! Russell Greaves would be debuting an Audi A1 that was also at the test session but some ongoing issues with the ESC would play havoc on Saturday.
With the last two previous club champion notably absent with their Subaru WRX’s Shane knew this could be an opportunity to take an outright victory, still a long shot but a little shorter than before. Shane kicked off round 1 with the quickest time of the round giving him an early buffer over the field, competing in the lowest class (0-2300cc) Shane was pitting himself against turbocharged all wheel drive cars from the open class and still gradually increasing his lead throughout the day.
Russell was competing in his first full event and still learning the difficult tracks but the loose gravel surface was upsetting the Audi’s stability program making it almost impossible to drive. The little 1600 turbocharged engine in the Audi meant that the car was bumped up to the 2300cc+ class but packed plenty of punch and will certainly be a contender in this class once sorted.
After 6 runs on Saturday, Shane had pulled a 2.5 second gap on the field and held the outright lead and a massive 12 second lead in his class with 4 fastest laps out of the 6 runs. Russell had finally fixed the ESC issue but picked up a couple of wrong direction penalties leaving him well down the order.
As Sunday rolled around we set off on another 5 runs for the day (runs 7-11), Shane smashed out the fastest times for runs 7 and 9 further increasing his lead to around 13 seconds outright. The newly installed LSD gave the pug incredible grip in the changing conditions and fantastic drive through the corners, it wanted to be driven incredibly hard and just ate up everything that was thrown at it.
With such a large lead Shane decided to back off slightly and coast home for an easy outright victory by just over 8 seconds and a whopping 18 seconds over his classes nearest rival. Russell was now putting in some respectable times in the Audi clawing back some positions but a couple more wrong direction penalties killed any chance he had of a comeback.
The Juniors
Brother and Sister combination of Lara and Mitchell Spencer have been competing in Khanacross for nearly 2 years now in a 710 Motorsport prepared Peugeot 307 and trained by their uncle Shane Logan. They have been building speed all year but it would be this weekend when they would shine! Having only just turned 17 years old and getting her drivers licence Lara put on an incredible performance to take out the ladies division and run 2nd in the Juniors category. Mitchell, just 15, took out top honours in the sub-juniors class by a healthy margin.
Both showed incredible maturity in their driving with each of them having a clean sheet with no penalties applied and no damage to the car which was well past its used by date. They will be upgrading to a Peugeot 206 for next year which will be faster and push their driving further. A deal was made last year that if we all managed to win our class we would get up to do a shoey in front of the crowd and that’s exactly what happened!
That was the final round of the year and we now look forward to the presentations in early December where we will see how we ended up in our championships for the year.
