THE Laser Electrical Inverell Race Team with driver Mark Trees returned home this week as the Outright Individual Champions of Queensland, winners of the Top 10 Shootout, winners of the Accumulative Time Trophy and winners of the 2A Turbo charged Sports Cars division, following wins on the weekend at Oakey in Queensland.
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“It was gazetted and billed as the Queensland Street Sprint Titles, a 12 race format over two days,” Trees said.
Trees said there were about 100 starters with all different kinds of vehicles.
“There were formula ones, formula threes, Ford Cobras, BMWs, Mustangs, you name it was there,” he said. “Our car went extremely well and on day one we jumped to the head of the leader board. We led all day on Saturday.
“Going into Sunday we were still in the lead, but with about three rounds to go we had a bit of an alternator problem, but we managed to fix that before the next heat.”
A Ford Cobra loomed up on them with three heats to go, and actually got ahead of Trees by .01 seconds.
“He was pushing us all weekend. A Cobra with a Dick Johnson racing engine and sequential gearbox, and he was right on our tail,” Trees said.
“In the last heat of the weekend we jumped ahead of him by .02 seconds, and we were able to maintain that going into the Top 10 Shootout between the 10 fastest cars.”
Going into that event Trees found damage to his rear spoiler.
“It was due to the extreme speeds. We were hitting 220 kilometres per hour in the straights, and pressure had broken the mounting brackets,” he said.
“The pit-crew jumped in and repaired the bracket with a bit of metal, some tek screws and (as all electricians know) a rattle gun to screw it together, and we went out.”
In the shootout, Trees drove first and gave the other drivers something to chase. It turned out to be a big ask of the others when he returned with a new track record time of 1:15.9.
“The Cobra who was giving me a hard time all weekend, he went out last, but came back in with 1:17.5. He was a bit disappointed but there was all cheers in our pit crew,” Trees said.