Bathurst Motor Festival 2016 Article by Bill Black Photos courtesy James Smith A number of club members made the annual Easter pilgrimage to Bathurst for the 2016 Bathurst Motor Festival. For many years Porsche Club members from all states have had the opportunity to drive the best track in Australia and one of the best anywhere in the world, Mount Panorama. Organised by PCNSW the Regularity group allows 55 Porsche owners to drive the public roads south west of Bathurst that form the track at well above the 60 kph speed limit which applies for most of the year. Although it is a “regularity”, I’m not aware of any driver who is trying to lap consistently at their nominated lap time. Without exception all are trying lap as quickly as possible with a PB the goal. With document check in and timing transponders hired on Thursday, scrutineering and driver briefing early Friday, all was set for the scheduled morning practice session. While waiting in the marshaling area it started raining, not heavy, but enough to turn the wipers on. Mount Panorama in the wet can best be described as sphincter tightening, particularly across the top of the Mountain and down from Skyline to Forest Elbow with concrete walls on
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both sides not that far away. Some drivers on slicks elected not to run. Each driver then had to nominate a regularity lap time made more difficult with practice on a wet track. We then had 4 runs over the next three days all in dry conditions, with Porsche Regularity being first on track both Saturday and Sunday mornings. Each run was scheduled for 20 minutes or 6 laps, whichever came first, unfortunately 3 sessions were red flagged resulting in a loss of laps due to minor incidents involving a 928, GT3 and 944. As usual there were a number of rare and desirable Porsches, whose owners were not afraid to push them around Mt Panorama at speeds definitely not applicable to demonstration laps, but driven hard the way Porsches are meant to be used. Chris Stannard again brought along his 964 RSR, the only right hand drive one ever made and an equally desirable 993 RSR driven by Brian Fitt were both posting lap times up there with the quickest. PCQ member Roger Hall entered his 1988 3.2 Carrera CS one of only 85 right hand drive examples of this light weight model. Unfortunately Roger had a deflating tyre on
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Sunday morning and missed the final run. Most Porsche models were represented including many of the newer models, with the grid dominated by GT 3’s (sixteen) and Cayman S’s (seven). With such a diverse array of Porsche models entered, ranging from Carrera Cup Cars to the lone 928, for safety reasons CAMS set both a minimum and maximum lap time. In theory no driver was allowed go quicker than 2 minutes 37 seconds or slower than 130% of this time being 3:24. Going quicker than the maximum time was not a problem, but the talented drivers in well sorted cars had trouble going slower than 2:37. Unfortunately PCQ member Phil Brook in his 3.6 911 IROC Replica was one who well and truly went under this lap time resulting in a couple of black flags, a visit to the stewards and exclusion from the regularity results. Phil said the CAMS Stewards were very decent in the way it was handled and although he had to back off in an effort to stay above 2:37, he still thoroughly enjoyed the week end. As I said to Phil, “if you’re going to be black flagged, it’s better for going too fast than for causing an accident or doing something stupid”.