What a legend! Darran from Dutch Courage Racing
Darran and his team from Dutch Courage Racing completed a hot and dusty 420 kms of racing at Goolgowi for the first round of the ARB Off Road Racing Champtionship this year on the 16th to 18th of March, Darran tells the story...
"Our alarm buzzing at 4.30 am Friday signalled the start of a long and tiring but ultimately rewarding weekend. A quick lap of the track in our road registered 4wd Friday afternoon allowed us to assess grip levels on different parts of the 65 km long track and build a strategy for the race on Saturday.
Prologue was another early start Saturday morning, ensuring everything was prepared and as good as it could be for our 7:12am start time. After an 18km sprint around the prologue circuit in the Colorado, we would find ourselves starting further back in the pack than we wanted for the race later that morning.
This wasn’t ideal when taking into account the amount of dust there would be. The new DCR navigator and I had a quick chat about possible scenarios and were confident we could get a positive result.
Concentrating on consistency for the day proved to be the right call. While other cars were changing flat tyres or running off the track because of the dusty conditions, we kept things smooth and straight.
Coming in for the first of 2 short breaks, the pit team went over everything with a fine tooth comb and decided we only needed fuel for the car and water for us!
As we went out for section 2, the temperature began creeping up to 39 degrees, making conditions inside the car quite uncomfortable. Once again we tried to concentrate on being smooth and consistent. Our second break, again, found the car fault free. The driver and navigator however needed some zooper doopers to encourage us to go back out!
Coming in after the final lap was an amazing sense of relief knowing we had managed to conquer 420 kms in conditions that were quite unusual for our sport. As the dust settled we managed to claim 2nd in class 5 and 8th outright out of 70 vehicles."
- Darran, Dutch Courage Racing
