MOTORSPORT: Aussie Randle in box seat for NZ Toyota title

Australia’s Thomas Randle has taken the lead in New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series being contested by some of the world’s top young open-wheeler hopes with just one round remaining.

Although the 20-year-old from Melbourne was only on the podium after one of the three races at Taupo in the middle of NZ’s North Island at the weekend, he finished ahead of previous series leader, Dutch teenager and Red Bull junior driver Richard Verschoor, in all of them.

Second in the second 15-lap race of the round at what is now called Bruce McLaren Motorsport Park, Randle was fourth in the other two races – a 15-lapper on Saturday and the 20-lap feature on Sunday, in which he was unable to find a way past defensive Austrian Ferdinand Habsburg despite being faster.

Verschoor, who only turned 16 in mid-December, had his worst round of the series, finishing eighth, sixth and seventh in the three races.

Randle, winner of two races earlier in the five-round series and stripped of another for jumping a start, will take a 27-point lead over him (692-665) into the final round next weekend at Manfeild, near Palmerston North, also on the North Island.

That venue is now named after another legendary NZ racer, Chris Amon, who died six month ago, and the concluding race will be the New Zealand Grand Prix over 35 laps of the 3.03km circuit. The other two races there will be over 20 laps, on Saturday, and 15 laps on Sunday morning.

“Bring it on,” Randle has posted on his Facebook page after the Taupo round, saying his Victory Motor Racing team “are doing an incredible job”.

Canadian Lance Stroll, who won the series two years ago, will make his Formula 1 debut at Melbourne’s Australian GP on the last weekend of March with the Williams team.

Russian Daniil Kyvat is another to have made it to F1 via the NZ summer series, while last year’s champion, Great Britain’s Lando Norris, now has ties to the McLaren team.

Pedro Piquet, a son of Brazilian triple world champion Nelson Piquet, won Sunday’s 15-lap race at Taupo for the M2 Competition team and, with 661, is now just four points behind Verschoor.

New Zealanders won two of the Taupo races – Brendon Leitch the first for Victory and Marcus Armstrong, a member of Ferrari’s junior academy, the third for M2, claiming the Denny Hulme Trophy.

Armstrong, overall winner of the Taupo round and also only 16, is fourth in the series on 598 points, just one ahead of Indian M2 teammate Jehan Daruvala.

Verschoor is driving for the Giles Motorsport team of former McLaren F1 senior mechanic Steve Giles, as are Australia’s other two participants in the field of 20 – Luis Leeds, of Melbourne, another Red Bull junior, and Harry Hayek, of Sydney.

Leeds had his best round of the series with two top 10 finishes (and eighth and a ninth) and is 11th in the standings on 347 points, while Hayek is 15th on 309.

McRae fastest up Rod Millen’s ‘mountain’ this time
Alister McRae, the Australian-based brother of the late but legendary Scottish rally world champion Colin McRae, won the King of Millen’s Mountain title at New Zealand’s Leadfoot Festival at the weekend.

McRae, who has been based in Perth, WA, for several years, rocketed up the 1.6km drive of Rod Millen’s ocean-front property on the Coromandel Peninsula east of Auckland in 49.43 seconds.

Aged 46 and driving a 1998 Subaru WRX STI with a 850hp (633kW) engine and running in full tarmac specification, with bigger brakes, rims and tyres, McRae was the only competitor to go under 50 seconds.

It also was the first time anyone other than a member of the renowned Millen family had won the Leadfoot trophy.

McRae has vowed to return next year because his time was not as fast as Rod Millen has gone previously.

Millen’s thunderous Toyota Celica was out of action this year, but his 1975 Mazda RX3 won the category for cars from 1960 to 1975 in 52.75 seconds.

Supercars great-turned-commentator Greg Murphy went up the drive 0.5 seconds quicker in the AP4 (Asia-Pacific four-wheel-drive) Holden Barina he is to drive in this year’s NZ Rally Championship.

American two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Al Unser Junior, a regular competitor at the Gold Coast Indy in its early days, was a special guest at Leadfoot and drove a 1915 Stutz loaned out by the Southward Museum.

Attendance over the two days of the festival was reported to have been 14,000.
F1 drivers give cockpit protection thumbs down
Introduction of a safety ‘halo’ above Formula 1 cockpits was postponed for this year and now there are bigger doubts about it for next year.

Authorative German journalist Michael Schmidt has reported in the Auto Motor und Sport publication that the governing Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) polled F1 drivers and – from 16 replies – seven voted against the device, five in favour and four abstained.

Moves for greater cockpit protection in open-wheeler cars came after the deaths of Jules Bianchi in F1 and Justin Wilson in IndyCar.

The FIA is continuing its research. Apart from the ‘halo’ that originated from a Mercedes design studio, Red Bull had proposed a Batmobile-style canopy.

Reigning but retired F1 world champion Nico Rosberg has said at a sports conference in Dusseldorf that efforts to improve safety must be pursued vigorously.

While this year’s cars, with bigger and wider tyres and more aerodynamics, are expected to be 4-5 seconds a lap faster at many circuits, they will weigh at least 728kg – 6kg more than earlier thought, and compared with just over 700kg in recent years and little more than 500kg in the 1970s.

In a sure sign that Ron Dennis won’t be returning to McLaren, this year’s F1 car from the team won’t have the familiar MP4 title before the model number. Instead it will be MCL32.

MP4 stood for Marlboro Project Four, representing the combination of the tobacco sponsor and former Brabham mechanic Dennis’ Project Four Formula 2 team that took control of McLaren in the early 1980s.

The MCL32 will be launched on February 24 in the papaya orange of McLaren’s F1 and CanAm cars of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The team is entering the third year of its second ‘marriage’ to engine supplier Honda but, having still been 2.35 seconds slower than Mercedes in qualifying at last year’s season-ending Abu Dhabi GP, speculation is mounting about a switch to BMW after news of a new engine project between McLaren’s road car arm and the German company.

Writing in Spanish sports daily AS, Manuel Franco said “there may be a secret hybrid V6 turbo project ready to launch”.

BMW has been out of F1 since 2009, when it relinquished its ownership of Swiss team Sauber.
Now Blue Oval eyes Swede success
Ford – or at least the M-Sport operation that fields its Fiesta in the World Rally Championship – won first time out in the new era of rallying in Monte Carlo and has every chance of repeating that at this week’s second round in Sweden.

Ford/M-Sport’s trump card now is Sebastien Ogier, the Frenchman who won the past four world rally titles with Volkswagen and is the only non-Scandinavian apart from his even more revered countryman Sebastien Loeb to have won Rally Sweden in its 63-year history.

Loeb was the first ‘outsider’ to triumph in the championship’s only true winter rally in 2004, for Citroen, while Ogier – with Loeb off the scene – has done it three times, in 2013, ’15 and ’16.

The only other driver to win the event, which also ventures into Norway, in the past five years has been Finn Jari-Matti Latvala – in 2012 in a Ford Fiesta and 2014 in a VW Polo.

The cars are fitted for this round with skinny tyres equipped with hundreds of tungsten-tipped studs to bite through the snow to capture grip on the hard ice below.

Sixty per cent of this year’s course is different to last year but will still have lots of big jumps, including the famous Colin’s Crest – named in honour of Colin McRae.

While Ogier’s M-Sport teammate, Estonian Ott Tanak, loves this high-speed rally he has never finished higher than fourth in five starts, but Norwegian Mads Ostberg – in another Ford again – has had five podiums in six outings.

Toyota insists the first season of its return to the WRC with its Yaris is a development year, but it has Latvala in its camp with his experience and form in this event. Apart from his 2012 and ’14 successes, his first WRC win was in Sweden in 2008 in a Ford Focus.

And he was second to Ogier in ‘The Monte’ last month on the debut of the Yaris.

Hyundai’s New Zealander Hayden Paddon was runner-up and won two stages in Sweden last year, while this year’s i20 coupe from the Korean manufacturer won seven stages in ‘The Monte’ and its Belgian driver Thierry Neuville was a minute in front there until an “off”.

Citroen – and especially its Northern Irish team leader Kris Meeke – will be looking to do much better in Sweden and Norway after a disastrous Monte with its C3s.

Meanwhile, Citroen and Hyundai are strongly opposed to the 2017 Polo, which VW had developed before its sudden withdrawal from rallying late last year, being homologated for a privateer team to run, although Toyota’s team chief Tommi Makinen favours it.

The French and Korean manufacturers want the FIA to stand firm on the rule that only manufacturers registered for the full championship be allowed to homologate cars.

Norwegian Andreas Mikkelsen, winner of VW’s finale at Rally Australia last November, has been trying to arrange a partial campaign in the 2017 Polo in which he did a lot of testing.