MITRE 10 MEGA ON TRACK AT RUAPUNA RACEWAY CHRISTCHURCH

Perfect weather has greeted the Mitre 10 Trade Race team for their outing at Ruapuna - the 2nd round of the New Zealand Championships for the NZV8 Ute Series. The Friday of any Championship round is simply for setting up the garage and getting two practice sessions under the belt - a seemingly simple task, yet today it has managed to produce a factor for concern, not just for the orange and black machine driven by James 'Huggi' Urquhart but for all the teams attending the event. That concern is the temperature build up in the tyres, and that will be rather problematic for everyone, given that they only have six tyres available to use over the weekend. In saying that, the tyres for the practice sessions can be any old ones you want and the units that Huggi went out with were in fact used ones from last season. However, the data coming back in is that the new ones - if not looked after properly - may fade fast. "The first part was really good" states Huggi, "when we went out we had turn-in and mid corner control, but the tyres went off pretty quickly. But I think they are nearly as old as me which means they should have plenty of life left in them! The main thing is we stayed on the track and didn't go playing in the sand and rubble like Peter Ward did!" So it will be classed as a successful outing for the Mitre 10 Trade Race Team, clean practice runs and equally clean data returned from the track. Next stop is the qualifying run on Saturday morning followed by the marble draw grid of race 1 in the afternoon.

Fast Facts: Ruapuna has 7 different track configurations the main one being

3.33km with 1.2km up to 3.44km options available.

The Holden Ute was rst manufactured in 1951 with the 'FJ' label.