Powerboating: Long awaited win for pair

It was "a long time between drinks" but it was worth it for Auckland powerboat racers Wayne Valder and Richard Shores as they had their first national offshore race series win together in Napier on Saturday.

The two mastered the seas, and a mainly light but deceptive swell off Ahuriri, Westshore and Bay View to win the Grant Linnell Building Offshore 100, the sixth of eight races in the series which started on Lake Taupo on January 27 and ends in Auckland on May 18.

It was the first win for Valder in six years, and for multiple championship-winning Shores the first since one race moonlighting in series rival Schick Hydro Racing last season.

Racing anti-clockwise on 12 laps of an L-shaped course, with the boot leg off the popular spectator vantage points of Perfume Point and Ahuriri, they won in 57min 51sec, one of the Napier race's faster times.

They finished with a surprising 1min 39sec gap to series leaders Tony Coleman and Chris Hanley who were second in Fujitsu Better Heat, the two boats having been in a close tussle over the first three laps, before Pro-Floors hit the lead and held on to it.

Shores said the conditions suited what he reckoned was a slower boat than the series leader, but the catamaran, which entered racing life in New Zealand as the original Sleepyhead of once regular champion Peter Turner, was in the latter stages cutting out each lap in about 5 minutes.

Scott Lewis and Murray Tuffin in Schick Hydro completed the battle of the big-banger Superboat class entries, finishing in 1hr 2min 42sec, and just avoided being lapped.

Napier racers Tony Carson and Brook Faulkner finished next in Red Steel, two laps down, for a pleasing win in the Superboat Lite class.

But they still need good fortune in the remaining races to head off Gordon Robinson and Andrew MacBeth in Alimax in the race for class honours, which Red Steel Steel won last year with an unprecedented record of eight wins in eight races.

Ex-Napier Boys' High School pupil Nick Campbell also tasted success with visiting driver Mike Knight in Espresso Engineer to win the 60-mile race, repeating a triumph of a year ago when they teamed up for the first time.

A feature of the race was the appearance of the 40-year-old wooden-hulled monohull Topaz, which won the series in 1975.

Racing in the Classic class, drivers Ian Reeves, 74, of Rotorua, and Bryan McLean, 73, of Whangarei, friends for over 50 years, thought they weren't even going to get a run as problems troubled the boat at the start.

"One of the tabs wouldn't work," said Reeves.

But it started working again and with the rest of the field well on its way in the distance, the two were on their way, ultimately completing the Napier offshore race for a third year in a row.

Of the 18 entries, the only two not to finish were sports entry OutboardPro, which flipped rounding the Bay View buoy late in the race, and War Machine.