1st ¼ MILE SPRINT AND MOTORKHANA

The Austin Seven Club sponsored a day of ¼ mile sprints and motorkhana at the Mitsubishi test facility near Tailem Bend on Sunday 10th April 2005. Not having tried either of these variations of motor sport previously I thought I'd give it a go. Car and driver preparation was pretty much the same as for supersprints at Mallala and I managed to get that all sorted out without too much worry.

The Supplementary Regulations said that the gates would be open at 7.30am and sign on and scrutineering would commence at 8.00am. So there I was bright and early, all rugged up heading up the freeway. It was a beautiful morning for driving and I saw a few other diehards out and about. Amongst them were a nice MG TC, a Jaguar Special that I had seen at the Historic Races in the past and a Clubman that I hadn't seen before.

I arrived a quarter of an hour after the gate opening time and there were only about a half a dozen other cars there and only one of them was a competitor. An hour later there were about 30 competing cars present, the majority being Mazda rotary engined cars of various types. After a drivers briefing it was time for practice. We were given one run on the drag strip and an introductory run through the motorkhana course.

The cars set off in number order. As I was number 74 I had time to go down to the start and watch the procedure. I expected it to be similar to the start of a hill climb with a sensor held by the starter in front of the driver's side front wheel. This was not to be. The start was controlled by a series of lights. Red, red, red, orange, green. If you jumped the start you didn't get a time so it paid to err on the side of caution and make sure the green had activated. After watching a few cars go through the procedure I thought I had it fairly well sussed out.

Number 73, the car in front of me was a Mazda MX5 Clubman (model designation - not a clubbie like ours). This had a 1.8 litre engine and a limited slip differential. As my car has a 1.6 litre MX5 engine I thought this would provide a good performance comparison. Everything went well on this first run and I was changing into fourth gear just before the end where I crossed the line with the speedo showing 141 Kmh.

Off to the side of the drag strip was an open sealed area where a motorkhana course had been set up using a series of flags. I was given a verbal run through of the course and then was given the opportunity to drive through it. It was very tight and I didn't get out of 1st gear. After about the second turn I was running a bit wide so had to slide the tail around a bit to avoid hitting a flag. From then on it was slide and correct all the way to the finish that was a "garage" designated by cones where you had to come to a complete halt. It was great fun but even then it was obvious that the "slower you went the faster you went", if that's not too Irish for you to understand.

My time for the ¼ mile was 16.5 seconds that I thought was reasonable although I had rather hoped to get into the 15s. We had four more runs before lunch. Two of these were quite good and I managed to get into the high 16s, on the other two I did a couple of magnificent racing changes from second to fifth. The times suffered accordingly and I disregarded those. Generally throughout the day I was running about a half a second faster than the MX5 Clubman. At around lunchtime it started to rain and this continued for about an hour.

Once it stopped and the skies cleared a bit the action resumed. The track was still quite wet so the remaining two runs were slow in comparison to the morning. The damp track made the motorkhana even more exciting than in the morning. A Falcon GT provided what was probably the best entertainment of the day. He lost it at the first flag and from then on it was a series of left and right donuts to the finish.

The day wound up at around 3 o'clock, so after tidying up the car and driver it was time to head home. There was enough drizzle around to require the use of the wipers from time to time but none came into the cockpit. All in all a great day. I'm not sure that drag racing is the Clubman's Forté so don't know whether I'll try it again, but the motorkhana could be a good way to learn car control if it was a little more open and you could get into 2nd gear occasionally.

After the supersprints at Mallala on May 1st there is a "come and try" hill climb day run by the Sporting Car Club on the Monday of the Adelaide Cup long weekend so I think I'll give that a go and see what it's like. It would be a good day for any other clubbie drivers to come and have a go as well.

Kym Ninnes

14 April 2005