Rain, rain, go away!
That was the hope of Masterton Motorplex general manager Bob Wilton after the wet delayed the start of Sunday’s competition. Eventually, though, despite the best efforts of Motorplex volunteers to dry the quarter-mile track, intermittent showers ended any prospect of racing on the second day of the ‘Mayhem” meeting at the international drag strip.
“We tried to get going about 11–12 o’clock, but as soon as we started sweeping the track, it started to spit again, and the slightest bit of moisture, that’s the end of it,” Wilton said.
“We just couldn’t carry on doing this all day long, and some of the big boys said we couldn’t go out there, so that was it.”
The early cessation of racing was a big disappointment for Wilton and supporters, who had turned out in big numbers on Saturday to witness some close qualifying racing in the popular Wild Bunch vs Outlaw 71s series. “Saturday was a cracker. It was a little bit hot, but everything was running smoothly, there were no oil-downs, no crashes, and you couldn’t ask for a better day. We had three rounds of qualifying; the Wild Bunch were going through really good but Sunday, we just didn’t see that it was going to rain as much as it did.”
One of those to impress Wilton was Masterton’s Steve Carlsen with two scintillating qualifying runs in his 1965 Ford, the first a 6.467-second pass at 217.02mph and the second a 6.520-second run at 216.5mph.
One hundred and fifty-six cars and motorbikes had lined up for the two-day meeting.
The last meeting of the season, the National Championship Grand Finals, will held at the Motorplex on the weekend of March 16–17.
