So the first of hopefully many future events was held over the weekend of the 7-8th of April just gone at a small town called Wyalkatchem about 200km’s east of the Perth cbd.
The event consisted of 2 days of racing at the local airstrip which is approximately 1540 meters long, with a live band for entertainment playing Saturday night at the local bowls club. Most if not all accommodation in town was booked out shortly after the event went on sale with a dedicated area set aside at the town oval for competitors & spectators alike to camp. However my dad, his friend & myself stayed at the Dowerin Pub/Motel a mere 30km’s away, and man do they make a killer surf & turf.
Anyway on with the event, Entries were limited to 200 competitors of which only about 175~180 turned up due to either breakages before the event or just not having vehicles complete in time. There was a regular entry fee of $250 or you could upgrade to VIP for another $250 all of which was non-refundable so as to provide a guaranteed financial kitty. I went VIP for 1 car and normal for the other as it allowed me to essentially “jump” the queue when I went out. Luckily for me I was upgraded to VIP for my second car at no additional cost. Which helped with the logistics side if i needed to work on either car or move camera’s around.
VIP entrants had a paved carpark and also got you a free lunch, access to the main airport building/toilets, tv and power to charge laptops/camera’s etc.
The main purpose of this event was to hold the standstill to 1000m timed event on the sunday, however it also consisted of roll on 400/800 drag racing on Saturday in which you could even have a passenger in the vehicle. Sunday then kicked off with the continuation of the 800 meter roll on racing again as the drivers preferred the roll on racing to the start lights as it meant less waiting time and more track time and helped those with high horsepower vehicles from spinning the wheels off the line for the first 400 meters 😉
Unfortunately during the sunday morning 800m roll on sessions Eddie from Active Automotive & a passenger in his yellow monaro had a roll over at around the 400 meter mark. I don’t know or want to guess what caused it, but luckily this particular car has a very decent roll cage that could take such an accident and both Ed & passenger were rescued pretty quickly by the onsite fire/ambo crews and were both walking around shortly after, However as a precaution they were airlifted back to Perth later in the day via RFDS.
Over both days there was a steady stream of spectators coming in and I’m lead to believe they had over 1700 spectators on the Saturday alone, with an additional 1300 on the sunday which is bloody incredible considering it’s at least a 2 hr drive just from Perth. Some competitors travelled around 1300km’s all up to compete so they were definitely keen.
We trailered 2 car’s there and I drove my VE there and back (including racing) with just an additional 20lt jerry can and still got back into Perth with over 1/4 tank.
Unfortunatly there was some issues with the timing equipment first thing sunday morning so one of my 1000m runs wasn’t timed (bugger as it was cooler and log showed more boost) than the afternoon run. Full results haven’t been released yet either but i asked for my data on the return to the pits. From memory my vy ute went 243kph vs 255kph in the VE, in which i have to take on face value for this year as the ute doesn’t hold a candle to the VE in power nor accelleration to have such a small margin. That and my logs for the same time show a much higher speed.