Motorsport: Bonnet blowout bummer

Gavin Yortt is now looking at the final stage in Manfeild.

The sound, the smell and those stubborn spooky lights on the dashboard were adding to that already weird feeling that everything wasn't all right with the usually reliable metallic beast.

It's every motor racing driver's nightmare and it doesn't discriminate as Hawke's Bay driver Gavin Yortt and his co-driver, David Grigor, found out during the second round of the Mahindra North Island Endurance series in South Auckland on Saturday.

"We were leading our class when just 20 minutes from home we blew our engine," Yortt said after they came away empty handed from the competitive class 3 for cars in the 1600cc to 2-litre range at Hampton Downs.

It felt like a kick in the chops for the pair who had overcome the elements in the first round for the chequered flag at the Bruce McClaren motorsport park in Taupo on June 4.

Was it the head? Or was it the pot? Ah, maybe it was the rod. Whatever the cause, the piston is guilty as charged but it's a condition the team suspect they inherited when they acquired the car.

"We've pulled the motor down and found a couple of defects so we'll look at it for the next couple of days to see what the damage is."

Needless to say if a driver was on the motorway he or she would be walking smartly to the nearest car dealer for another number, especially if there isn't a back-up one in the garage at home.

However, Yortt and his team aren't blowing their gasket over the mishap and the post-mortem examination is well under way.

"These things can happen to anyone so we'll now focus on the next round," he said of the final fling of the series at Manfeild Autocross on Saturday, July 23.

Ironically, Hampton Downs on Saturday served up similar conditions to Taupo.

"It was another day of atrocious weather. We had rain and lots of it and then it stopped," said Yortt who found himself in the driver's seat of the two-litre Performance Honda Civic for about two hours of the three-hour race.

With wet-weather tyres coming into play the race entered another realm of strategies that the Bay pair found "quite exciting" after taking their place in 14th place out of 43 on the starting grid.

But about 90 minutes into the race, it stopped raining and the track started to dry out to test the drivers' mettle even more with caution periods that added to the stop-start affair.

"I don't think anyone changed from wet-weather tyres to dry ones," Yortt explained, revealing the wet-weather tyres on a dry track often robbed them of five per cent of normal speed as the rubber started wearing out. Nevertheless, it would have been treacherous to switch to dry ones considering small pools of water were still visible on parts of the track.

"If there's still wet patches on the track then it's like being on ice so you'd hit the wall or something and it'd be curtains."

After several seasons of finishing in the top two or three, last season was not a very eventful one for the Bay pair who failed to finish in two races due to gearbox failure.

International Motorsport's Jonny Reid and Neil Foster experienced the warm fuzzies in their Audi R8 GT3 LMS, putting a fend on Trass Family Motorsport's Richard Muscat and Sam Fillmore (Ferrari 458 GT3 ) for a 1.8-second relief.

"They beat the Ferrari when they overtook it in the last five laps," said Yorrt.

John McIntyre and Bay co-driver Simon Gilbertson, who prevailed in Taupo, settled for third in their SaReNi Camaro GT3.

"Look out when Johnny [McIntyre] is driving because he takes no prisoners," said Yortt of the Bay-born driver who lives in Nelson.

Tim Martin and Steve Farmer (Endless Nissan R35 GT-R) claimed class one honours. The Johnstone/Johnstone Honda S2000 won class two while fellow Honda pair Shaun Morris and Richard Gee had the measure of class three.