Graham North Takes NW Regional Win At Southport

Graham North reports from the North West Regional @ Southport

Sunday the 25th of July was the 5th round of the BRCA North West Regional Championships held at the Southport Radio Car Club. The weather was good for the entire day with the odd threat of rain that never really came. The track was a similar layout to the National track run the week before so we were confidant we could achieve a good result. As always in the dry at Southport the grip was immense, and the onus was on making the car easy to drive in practice as the track is very hard to go clean on for 5 minutes. Practice is always busy at the NW Regionals, but never the less we were happy with our cars heading into the first round.

Qualifying

Graham North was pretty much “best of the rest” in qualifying all day, taking 2,3,2,2 in rounds, but closing the gap on pace to the very quick local driver Colin May every run, gridding up second behind him on the A main grid. Damian Whittle had a super consistent time in qualifying taking 4,4,5,3 in round to grid up 4th on the grid.

Just behind Damo on the grid lined up Anthony Steel in 5th (6,5,4,7 in rounds) and Paul Crawford (5,10,10,5 in rounds) in 6th with their Durangos, giving Team Durango 4 cars on the A main grid, but all in the top 6!

A Final

The start was fairly regulation until half way around the lap, when Gareth Hill slipped up the inside of Graham, dropping him down to 3rd, but only a couple of corners latter Gareth made a mistake, allowing Graham back to chase Colin. It was on lap 2 that all hell broke loose. Colin May threw it off the track and at the same time there was a huge crash behind Graham, the outcome being Graham leading by about 8 seconds over Paul Crawford in second place who at this moment did his best wing man impression to keep the pack behind him, battling hard with local hero Colin May in the process to pull off an awesome move up the inside of him onto the centre table top! From this point Graham didn’t really look back just regulating the gap and only doing what was needed and certainly not troubling many apexes!

The race finished with Graham North taking his first, and Durango’s first, North West Regional win, with Damian Whittle 6th, Anthony Steel 7th and Paul Crawford 8th (still his best ever Regional finish). A nice birthday present for Graham!

Thanks to Paul Rotheram for the pictures.

 

Source: Team Durango