The Townsville City Autosports Club has held the fourth and final round of its Mount Stuart Hillclimb Series, with Ben Littlefield securing a commanding victory ahead of 22 competitors.

Using the event to unveil his newly built Mitsubishi Evo, Littlefield needed just one run out of the available six to post a time that remained unbeaten for the rest of the day.

Littlefield’s first run of 58.39 seconds ended up being enough to seal victory over Flynn Dunkerton, who steered his Subaru WRX to a well-deserved second place just seven-hundredths short of Littlefield’s time.

It took Dunkerton until his fifth run of the day to post a time within a tenth of the leader, but he was unable to go that extra mile on his last run.

Finishing a further half second off Dunkerton in third place was Chris Latimer who made it two Evos on the podium – his best time of 58.95 seconds coming at that midway point of the event.

The only other driver to go under one minute was Robert Horsfall in the Nissan 180SX and it happened on only one occasion – his fourth attempt of the day seeing him record a 59.43 second run.

Completing just two runs of the course before having an off in the third, Littlefield then took a conservative approach and chose to rest the car for the remainder of the day.

Remarkably, his decision to switch cars for the remaining three runs proved almost as successful as he ended up posting the fifth fastest time of the day in his Nissan Silvia.

With an outright victory and top five finish in two different cars, Littlefield was thrilled with his performance.


“It was a really good day for me,” Littlefield said.

“I was happy to finally get a run in the Evo as it’s never run competitively before. It has only recently been put together so to get the win was fantastic – especially knowing it can potentially go a lot quicker.

“I knew it would be fast, but I didn’t think that I would get a time like that off my first run so it was a bit of a surprise but a nice one nonetheless.

“Being the last round of the year, when I did go on the grass, I did a bit of damage to the front bar and thought that it was best to retire it as I didn’t want to do more damage.

“I wasn’t there chasing the win, so even if Flynn had managed to beat my time, I wasn’t going to bring the Evo back out. By no means was I going to push it and I was content with my time.

“Having both cars there proved a good decision because the Nissan has been quite good for me in the past and it seemed to deliver another good result.”

The club’s next event will be the North Queensland Khanacross in Mossman on 2-3 October.