Oran Park 6-Hour qualifying
22-11-09 by Marko Alat
Oran Park will soon be no more. Half-built McMansions are at its back fence already. Fitting, then, that the farewell motorcycle race at this icon of Australian motorsport should be a running of an iconic Australian motorsport event – the 6-Hour endurance race.
Organised by James Spence Promotions with naming-rights backing from Bel-Ray Lubricants, the event has attracted a healthy field of an even 30 teams, and a strong contingent of riders who don’t just do this for fun. Joining the organiser himself on the #6 The 6 Hour team R1 is former FIM World Endurance Champion Warwick Nowland, while the Dean Evans-managed Revolution team has Australian Superbike regulars, brothers Damian and Alex Cudlin, on their 2009 R1 built by the Central Coast Performance Cycle Centre. The #36 Fireblade of the Demolition Plus team and the black #63 2009 R1 of Big Kahuna Racing each go one better, with three ASBK runners sharing the racing duties – Russel Holland, Gareth Jones and Craig Coxhell for Demolition Plus, Grant Hay, Zac Davies and Daniel Stauffer for Big Kahuna.
Kawasaki turned out with backing for two teams – #10, fronted by ASBK runner Jason Kain, backed by Mark Hatch and Rod Taplin, and #96, run by the staff of the Liverpool-based dealer Aitken’s Motorcycle World, with shop owner Paul Aitken managing, his Superstock-1000-pilot son, Jamie, as lead rider, backed up by Michael McMillan and veteran Murray Clark.
Behind these leading five teams come the enthusiastic shop-based teams. Cessnock Motorcycles, a big KTM dealer, turned out in matching orange team t-shirts and Simon Galloway, Phil Chapman and Phil Lovett on the tidy #46 KTM Super Duke. Kawasaki Newcastle have put a pair of experienced Central Coast racers on board their #15 ZX-10R – Graeme Wilshaw and Ken Bradley. Sy’s Harley-Davidson are fielding the lone air-cooled entry – a Harley XR1200. Hiding behind its #9 number board are David Butler and Dave fuller. The XR1200 doesn’t walk away with the least-likely-entry trophy, though. Team Italian Stallion’s choice of a Benelli TnT 1130 for Adrian Pierpoint, Paul Row and Derrick Pastuszek to punt around pips them there.
Dailybike friends, Sam Ayliffe, James Corcoran and Kevin Corcoran of Team Astute Finance, are in the rest of the field. Their #11 series 1 Yamaha R6 is typical of the club-level racers keen for the strategic experience of endurance racing.
A six-hour endurance race is a different proposition to the six, eight or ten-lap sprints which dominate Australian road racing. Patience is needed out on the track, and speed and precision in the pits. A baking-hot sun pushed the air temperature during Saturday’s practice and qualifying over 40 degrees, and made tyre wear out on the track and engine cooling during pitstops an issue. Very few of the teams looked likely to get away without at least one tyre change. Rider fatigue will also be a factor. The Cudlin brothers will run a strategy based on hour-long stints, with fuel stops halfway along. The less experienced runners will be lucky to manage half that if the heat keeps up on race day, as it is forecast to. Several of the faster bikes, the #63 R1 of Big Kahuna Racing, in particular, were having trouble keeping their wheels in line. As per Superstock regs, street-legal treaded tyres are used, and even with the minimal pipes-and-remap tuning allowed, on a blazing hot day, the latest batch of litre sportsbikes can be too much for anything short of a full slick.
In endurance, qualifying means relatively little. Russell Holland was the only one to threaten a sub-1:10 time, banking a 1:10.087. Only Team Demolition’s Grant Hay and Zac Davies dipped into the 1:10’s, the rest of the top teams content with times down to the 1:13’s. From there, qualifying times ranged down to trackday-like 1:26’s. Laurie Fyffe, team manager and lead rider for team Radguard, showed up a good portion of the field when he put his #32 GSX-R600 into eighth with a time of 1:16.239. A good half-dozen Superstock-spec litre bikes are behind him. Our team Astute aren’t doing too badly. Qualifying against everyone’s number one rider, Sam Ayliffe’s 1:19.352 put him 23rd. Against “softer” opposition, #2 rider James Corcoran managed 14th with a time just about a second quicker.
The race kicks off with a Le Mans start at 12:30. Plenty of time to sleep in and still make the race and take part in saying farewell to Oran Park… forever, unfortunately. There’s no getting away from that.
- Marko Alat
Tags: 6-Hour, James Spence Promotions, Oran Park, qualifying
