The Motorsport Australia Victorian State Circuit Racing Championships took over Sandown International Raceway on the weekend as the Australian Sports Sedan Association put on a highly successful round of the state championship.
Hosting seven regular categories, the Australian Sports Sedan Association run event spanned Saturday and Sunday, offering three races per category in what unfolded to be a thrilling weekend of motorsport.
Of the weekend’s categories, it was the Porsche 944 competition that delivered the most nail-biting action as Chris Lewis-Williams took out the round win following some exciting races.
Claiming two wins and a runner-up finish, Lewis-Williams’ victory was not without a serious challenge from Cameron Bellar who, after losing the top spot after race one, trailed Lewis-Williams by gaps as small as two tenths of a second, before less than a second separated the top three of Lewis-Williams, Bellar and Adam Brewer in the final race.
While the race results were more varied in the Rightway Industrial Saloon Cars Nationals, the category also delivered some of the weekend’s closest competition as Scott Dornan, Grant Johnson and Bradley Caughan each enjoyed a win apiece – the most thrilling of these being in the opener where Dornan reached the chequered flag less than a second ahead of the third placed Travis Lindorff.
Mark Kakouri’s race two win in the Victorian V8s was also one of the weekend’s best, delivering his only top three finish of the event with an incredible landslide win of 34 seconds ahead of Greg Taylor in second.
However, it was Brian Finn who ultimately took out top honour for the category, achieving much smaller, but more frequent wins across races one and three.
Meanwhile, in Formula Vee and the Garagistic BMW E30 Drivers Cup, the overall winners picked up clean sweeps across the round, with Reef McCarthy (Formula Vee) and Royce Lyne (BMW E30s), respectively, dominating their categories.
While McCarthy’s wins were often down to the wire, with gaps as small as two seconds between him and Patridge in third in race two, Lyne’s overall win was almost guaranteed from the very outset, after achieving a win of over 10 seconds in race one - a gap he was able to replicate in race 3.
In the Improved Production and Formula Ford Cars categories, each round winner just missed out on a trifecta of wins having picked up two wins but just missing out on a third.
Improved Production victor Luke Grech-Cumbo rose to first after an impressive third place in race one which saw him finish less than four seconds behind Danny Timewell. But it wasn’t long before Grech-Cumbo replaced Timewell for the lead, with Timewell falling to fourth and then 19th in the remaining two races.
Matthew Hillyer’s path to victory wasn’t so clear-cut in Formula Ford, with Harrison Sellars rising from fourth to first after race one, claiming one of Hillyer’s wins by just over a second.
Sellars continued to put up an impressive fight in race three, just ahead of Jake Santalucia in third who rounded out an unbelievable gap of less than half a second between first and third.
The Motorsport Australia Victorian State Circuit Racing Championships return next month, with Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit to host the fifth round of the 2023 season on 22-24 September.
