The Motorsport Australia Tasmanian Circuit Racing Championships season got underway on the weekend with more than 130 entries across 10 categories in action.
 
Held at Baskerville Raceway over three days, the competitors in the first state circuit championship round for the year put on a show as there were plenty of close battles throughout.
 
Formula Vee offered one of the most thrilling duels of the weekend despite Michael Vaughan winning all but one of the category’s five races. While Adam Prewer could only pick up the race two win, the duo finished within half a second of each other in four races.

Prewer may have just missed out on the win in Formula Vee, but he did enjoy a nail-biting victory in the Regularity, where he was behind the wheel of a Honda Civic and edged out Nick Embrey by just one point at the conclusion of the five sessions.
 
In addition to the regularity, Jeffrey Hindle claimed a more comfortable victory in the Historic Regularity while David Rowell and Ian Johnson had a good battle in the supersprints.

The race results weren’t as close in the combined Historic Touring Cars and Holden HQs compared to Formula Vee, as Phil Ashlin and Scott Cordwell put on a masterclass – each bagging two wins and three podiums – however it was Ashlin’s double points win and Cordwell’s third place in race three that gave the former the victory.

Lower down the field, Andrew Toth was too dominant in the Holden HQ class – winning all five races. 

In Sports GT A, B & C, there were three different race winners, with Troy Johnson and Tony Warren each taking out two races, while Andrew Reader won the opening race.
 
Although Johnson’s two victories came in the final two races, which included the double point affair, a DNF in the opener and Warren’s three podiums in a Mitsubishi Evo saw the latter take top honours.
 
In Racing & Sports Cars, a hattrick of wins on Sunday and two podiums on Saturday was enough to earn Jeremy Dyer and his Cheetah Mk 8 the round win over Phil Sutton and race winners Rod Bender and Daniel Hoult.

Sports Sedans winner Ben Purtell guided his Nissan 180sx to a similar record, only his three wins were split by two runner-up finishes, with Craig Sheahen and Brad Chick winning race two and four respectively.
 
In the Hyundai Excels, Jackson Shaw’s three wins just got him over the line over Jeremy Bennett, with the latter picking up the other two victories. Both drivers capped off their weekend with podiums in the other races, however it was Shaw’s victory of three tenths in the penultimate race that proved the difference despite a strong comeback from Bennett.

Just one clean sheet occurred during the weekend, and it belonged to one of the biggest categories as Ayrton Richardson enjoyed five wins from five Improved Production races.
 
The next round of the Motorsport Australia Tasmanian Circuit Racing Championships will be at Symmons Plains Raceway on 24-25 February.