CLASS 4&5 NATIONAL CHAMPIONS
Another awesome weekend down south, unofficially claiming the New Zealand Class 4&5 Championship and bringing home another top 5 in the Porsche.
Practice day was very eventful with the BMW only making it out for one lap. With a massive effort from the team and some awesome locals we received the driveshaft back late Friday and had everything back in the car ready to go Saturday. Practise Lap 2 was going to be qualifying Saturday morning..
Practice in the Porsche was tricky with puddles on most apex’s. P4 in FP1 and P5 in FP2 and P3 in the last session was a great day out. Great effort by the team all day!
Qualifying in the BMW started with Brett so he could finally get some laps. Plan was to handover to me later in the session but the Red flag put paid to that. We were set to start P19 but the great news was that Brett reported the driveline felt fine.
Qualifying in the Porsche was always going to be challenging with sub 1 minute lap times making it difficult to find a clean gap. We couldn’t quite maximise the green tyre but still managed to qualify in P4 with only a single Porsche MR in-front of us by a hundredth of a second. P4 was great for a 991.1.



The race in the BMW was quite possibly one of the most enjoyable races I’ve had so far on tarmac. With myself not doing any laps in practise or qually I was jumping into the car blind. With another safety car at the start of the pit window I was in for another 40 minute stint. I tried to get on with it straight away and we did battle with the fact the car hadn’t turned any practise laps. We were making ground on our rival for the NZ Championship Chris Wall but a late safety car gave us one last shot. We had a 5 lap sprint to the end with 4 cars between us and Chris on the restart. I tried to hurry through the lapped traffic as quick as I could, we both got caught behind traffic coming out of the last corner and I got a run around the outside to clear him before turn 1. We had an awesome battle switching positions a number of times. Chris had a big dive into the penultimate corner on the last lap and we were side by side going into the last corner. I held him as tight as I could and fortunately for us he out braked himself and we slipped backed under to provisionally claim the Class 4&5 National Title! P6 was a great result from a P19 start. Great to see Chris straight after the race with a huge grin on his face. Stoked to provisionally claim my first National title with Brett Sullivan. It’s awesome for him to get this result after his massive incident not so long ago and I can’t thank him enough for letting me be part of his journey back!
Ten minutes later and it was straight into the second one hour in the Porsche. Having outqualified a lot of newer gen cars I knew the pressure would be on. We handled the early laps well and comfortably set about the task in 5th place. We gained 2 spots during the pitstop but lost those whilst dicing in lapped traffic. Following the final safety car we restarted behind some fast lapped cars and lost touch with the front four cars. I couldn’t find a safe spot to make a move but managed the gap behind and held 5th place for the rest of the race. Another solid result in our 2nd race which saw the oldest Porsche in the field punching hard again! We had a goal of simply learning the car and tracks with our 2 races in the South so very happy for the whole team to come out of those 2 races sitting P3 in Class 2 Sierdc.
Big thank you to our partners:
Perspective Group
Elite Motorsport Academy New Zealand
Christopher Scrimgour