MOTORSPORT: Aussie Randle's stocks keeps rising

Only 20 cars will be on the grid for the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in less than two months following the collapse of the Manor team at the end of last week.

Two of those 20 new, more aggressive-looking F1 cars will be driven at Melbourne’s Albert Park by graduates of, among other things, New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series (TRS). They are Canadian rookie Lance Stroll, 18, who won the TRS title two years ago, and Russian Daniil Kyvat, 22, who raced in the NZ summer open-wheeler series six years ago and, despite some notorious blemishes in F1 early last year, remains part of the Red Bull racing ‘family’ with Scuderia Toro Rosso.

Britain’s Lando Norris, the TRS champion last summer, is now a junior driver with the McLaren F1 team.

It’s clear then, that good showings in the TRS can take a young driver places. It’s not essential to win the title (Kyvat finished only fifth, with now Walkinshaw Supercar racer Scott Pye among those ahead of him) but it obviously helps, along with success elsewhere, meaning Europe.

We’ve been following the TRS this month, especially the form of Thomas Randle – one of three Australians racing in it this season.

Randle had another win at the weekend, at the Hampton Downs circuit between Auckland and Hamilton. now owned by Australian GT supremo Tony Quinn. Thus Randle is now only 23 points behind the leader, Dutch lad Richard Verschoor – a member of Red Bull’s youth squad.

Two rounds, with a total of six races, remain. Randle, with 514 points, could yet win it, although Verschoor, on 537 points, must remain a firm favourite despite seeing his lead slashed at Hampton Downs.

Randle, older than most of his opposition in this season’s TRS at 20, had a win at the opening round at Christchurch’s Ruapuna circuit and crossed the finish line first in another at Invercargill’s Teretonga a week later. He was later stripped of victory there for jumping the start – the 10sec penalty applied dropped him to seventh.

He was the pacesetter all weekend at Hampton Downs, but lost the lead of the first of the three races there soon after the start (sliding wide on a dirty track) and finished third. He opted for ‘old’ tyres in the second race for which the grid was reversed for the top six drivers and finished seventh, then stamped his class on the third, feature race over 20 laps.

“We had the speed all the way through the weekend – on Friday we topped all the timesheets in practice, qualified on pole in both qualifying sessions, and won the round,” Randle said.

“Verschoor was involved in a crash [in the feature race] and finished near the back of the field, so that was good for me because I’d been 70-odd points behind.

“Hopefully we can carry this form into round four at Taupo [next weekend] and get the lead of the championship.”

Randle’s main-race win at Hampton Downs earned him the New Zealand Motor Cup, which the Kiwis are calling the most prestigious trophy in their country’s motorsport – somewhat surprisingly considering there are also the Lady Wigram and NZ Grand Prix trophies.

Driving for Victory Motorsport, Randle became the first Australian since Warwick Brown at Pukekohe in 1975 (in the days of the Formula 5000 Tasman Series) to claim the NZ Motor Cup, although Sir Jack Brabham had won it three times (1958, ’60 and ’61 at the Ardmore circuit) during the ‘original’ Tasman.

Other names on the Cup include NZ hero Bruce McLaren, Keke Rosberg (winner of Adelaide’s first Australian GP and father of reigning but retired F1 world champion Nico), and John Surtees, the only man to have world titles on two wheels and four.

So Randle is in elite company now.

Whether he’s going to get to F1 is another matter. He’s signed up for a season of sports car racing in the new LMP3 Prototype series in Britain this year. That’s with Douglas Motorsport, for which he raced in British Formula 3 last year, having come out of Australian Formula Ford and Formula 4.

Sports car racing at 20 is an odd route to take if a driver has serious ambition to make it to the top in open-wheeler racing. It may be a budgetary matter. Even if that’s so, the top junior open-wheeler teams in Europe may take a closer look at Randle now on the basis of his outstanding form in NZ this month.

One of the other Aussies in the TRS, Melbourne 16-year-old Luis Leeds, scored his best result of the series in the NZ Motor Cup race - sixth, while Harry Hayek from Sydney was eighth.

Like Verschoor, Leeds and Hayek are driving for Giles Motorsport, the team run by former senior McLaren F1 mechanic Steve Giles, but neither is in the top 10 of the 20 drivers from around the world in the series.

Meanwhile, Sydney’s Joey Mawson, who appears the most likely of the young crop of Australians racing overseas to get anywhere near F1, continues to lead India’s MRF Challenge after the weekend’s round in Delhi, with only the round at Chennai in mid-February remaining.

Mawson, another 20-year-old, finished first, second, third and fourth in the four races at Delhi to give him a 27-point lead heading to Chennai.

He’s had 10 podiums in 12 races so far and one of his rivals is Michael Schumacher’s17-year-old son Mick, who Mawson beat to the German F4 title last year.

Giz does the biz, but all for nought
Supercars and Bathurst 12 Hour defending champion Shane Van Gisbergen led the GT Daytona class in the middle of the weekend’s 2017 Rolex 24. But two laps after one of his co-drivers, Cooper MacNeil, took over the Mercedes-AMG GT3, it hit a wall in tricky conditions that MacNeil said were “slicker than ice”.

After two hours trying to repair the Merc the Riley Motorsports/WeatherTech Racing crew gave it away as a lost cause.

The car was classified 48th outright among the field of 55 and 21st in class, having started 24th of the 27 in class after qualifying was entrusted to MacNeil. Van Gisbergen and nine other drivers in the race are now flying to Sydney to make their way to Mt Panorama for next Sunday’s Bathurst 12 Hour.

The 2017 Rolex 24 was the competition debut of the IMSA series’ new Daytona Prototype International LMP2-based enclosed sportscars. Featuring control chassis the new cars have unique manufacture styled bodywork and branded engines.

Cadillac’s new DPI cars finished first and second outright in what is now America’s major endurance race. But not without controversy -- after Ricky Taylor edged past Filipe Alburquerque with seven minutes remaining in a move even Taylor’s team owner father, Wayne, called “a silly move”.

The other drivers in the victorious Caddie were retired four-time NASCAR champion and three-time Daytona 500 winner Jeff Gordon, Max Angelleli (who has now retired but remains a part-owner of the Taylor team), and Ricky Taylor’s brother, Jordan.

While one of the new Nissan-powered prototypes was fourth, the two new twin-turbo four-cylinder Mazda DPIs were classified only 40th and 46th after problems that included a broken transmission and a fire from a blown engine.

Ford replicated its GT LM class win at last year’s Le Mans 24-Hour, with American Joey Hand, German Dirk Mueller and Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais again the successful drivers.

Mueller nosed ahead of a Ferrari and then a Porsche 911 RSR in the final minutes of the race.

That Ford wound up fifth outright, just seven laps down on the Cadillac prototypes, with two others ninth and 11th.

However, ex-Sydneysider Ryan Briscoe spun backwards into a wall just before half-distance and, while he drove the car back to the pits for repairs, efforts to repair it ceased after an hour.

A Porsche 911 GT3 R won the GT Daytona class ahead of an Audi R8 LMS in which German Christopher Mies was one of the drivers. A slow fuel stop perhaps cost Mies victory.

An eagerly-awaited V8 Lexus RC F GT3 was the first retirement when Scott Pruett crashed, although he claimed to have been hit from behind. The second RC F expired late in the race and was classified 14th in the GT D class.

Honda’s(Acura) NSX GT3 debut was also a tough blooding but yielded an impressive result. The fastest of the two NSXs actually lead its class late in the race, however, first a lost bonnet and then electrical gremlins saw it stop with just one hour to run. The second NSX finished fifth in class, just outside the top 20 overall.

Another Mercedes AMG run by Australian owner-driver Kenny Habul’s Sun Energy1 Racing, and in which Paul Morris and Maro Engel shared the driving duties, finished 42nd.