The farewell race at Sydney’s Oran Park, the Bel-Ray 6-Hour, served up endurance racing delights in spades to everyone who braved the all-day-long hellish heat and the wind which picked up in the afternoon.

If, as they say, anything can happen in racing, in endurance racing it usually does. Pitstops bring competitors passed many laps ago back like zombies. Even crashes don’t guarantee someone will stay out of the way, and after a racer has pulled in and climbed off the bike, it’s only to rest, not to call it a day.

Because of the pitstops, crash repairs and safety car periods constantly shuffling and compressing the field, endurance racing makes for great watching. Someone’s always putting the pass on someone, there’s always a seven-bike freight train somewhere on the track, and because there’s hours and hours of non-stop racing on the menu, there’s no real need to hold off on going to the bog or the snack car – they’ll still be racing when you come back.

Saturday’s qualifying performance, and the resumes of the riders and teams, put outright victory – and the none-too-shabby $10,000 winners’ purse – within reasonable reach of five teams: the pole-getters from team Big Kahuna Racing on the #63 black 2009 R1, Demolition Plus on the #36 Fireblade built by Geoff Winzer, Dean Evans’ Revolution team on the Rob Halcroft-built #1 R1, race organiser James Spence’s own The 6-Hour team on the #6 R1, and Team Green 2 with their #96 ZX-10R.

Clocking up 277 laps completed by the fall of the chequered flag, it was Demolition Plus’ crew of Russell Holland, Craig Coxhell and Gareth Jones which triumphed with a convincing three-lap margin over Big Kahuna Racing’s Grant Hay, Zac Davies and Dan Stauffer, who managed the race’s fastest lap, a 1:10:994. A further three laps back, The 6-Hour team’s trio of James Spence, Warwick Nowland and David Johnson outdistanced the Revolution team pairing of the Cudlin brothers, Damian and Alex, by just over 36 seconds.

Fifth was taken by a Kawasaki ZX-10R, but by the #10 bike of Team Green, with Mark Hatch, Jason Kain and Rod Taplin aboard, not the #96 machine of Jamie Aitken, Michael McMillan and Murray Clark. They finished just a lap outside top ten after, Murray Clark, the senior rider in the team, lowsided exiting the downhill turn 7. 20 minutes were lost getting the bike back to the pits and repaired. Team manager Paul Aitken was philosophical about the result, confident that, if not for the crash, the team’s strategy of hour-long stints would have brought them victory against the competition’s 45-minute stints. Team Green’s fifth place, however, was achieved on a 1000cc production bike, rather than a more – albeit slightly more – modified Superstock machine. They beat home an even 10 1000cc Superstock teams.