Sydney Motorsport Park hosted a huge round of the Motorsport Australia NSW Motor Race Championship, with more than 150 drivers entered in the two-day event.
With five categories in action on Saturday and another four on Sunday, there was non-stop racing over the course of the weekend with a number of high profile drivers taking part.
One of those drivers was Porsche PAYCE Carrera Cup Australia regular Duvashen Padayachee and the New South Wales based driver dominated the Production Sports Cars class to comfortably win both races on Sunday.
With Carrera Cup drivers encouraged by the category to look for other drives while the series waits for its next round in 2020, Padayachee took advantage of the rule and showed his class at state level, beating Geoff Morgan in the opening race by 16 seconds and Caspar Tresidder in the second by 12 seconds.
“We learned a lot this weekend – we were able to do some race runs in the Carrera Cup car and we were able to see how the tyres worked in different scenarios,” Duvashen said.
“We knew it was going to be a challenge competing for outright wins up against some high-quality GT3-spec cars this weekend, but our performance just shows the quality of Porsches and we were pleased to showcase the potential of the current generation Cup cars.”
Joining the Production Sports Cars on Sunday were Formula Race Cars, HQ Holdens, Formula Vee and the Production Touring Cars, which boasted the weekend’s largest field.
Daniel Oosthuizer and Matthew Holt enjoyed a win and runner-up apiece ahead of Michael Kavlic in the opening two races, before 19-year-old Jack Winter stormed home to a well-deserved victory over Aaron Tebb in the category’s trophy race.
As Oosthuizer and Holt finished fourth and fifth respectively in the round’s final race, it was Kavlich who left the event with the most points after securing another podium finish – making him the only driver to pick up three podiums in all three races.
The day’s other categories saw clean sweeps occur as Luke Harrison won all three HQ Holden races over Glenn Deering, and Greg Muddle who did the same in Formula Racers. Aaron Pace won both Formula Vee races ahead of Craig Sparke and John McDonald.
On Saturday, the competition was just as entertaining as five regular state categories enjoyed three races, including one of the headline acts for the weekend in the RX8 Cup.
With 23 drivers competing in the one-make category, Justin Barnes’ two wins over Ryan Gorton’s one was enough for the former to score a thrilling one-point victory come the end of the round.
While the RX8 Cup had Saturday’s biggest field, Supersports had an array of national competitors with Radical Australia Cup and Australian Prototype Series regulars Peter Paddon, Stephen Champion and Sue Hughes competing in all three races.
However, neither could secure the outright victory as the honour went to Neale Muston after he ended the weekend with two wins and a runner-up, while Paddon notched up three podiums behind Muston and Champion picked up two top -fives.
There were contrasting stories in Improved Production’s two categories with Kurt Macready leading Jason Hendy and Bob Jowett in all three Under 2L races, while the Over 2L category had three different race winners in Joseph Lenthall, Scott Tutton and Jordan Cox.
Like Macready, Thomas Sargent has an enjoyable day out on Saturday with the Tegra Australia representative grabbing three wins from three races in the Formula Ford Championship.