Motorsport: Hammer down for glory at Woodhill

Neville Smith hopes to compete on the day. Photo / Supplied

Woodhill's pine forests in northwest Auckland will throb with off-road racers in New Zealand's toughest endurance event on June 5.

The toughest off-road endurance race in New Zealand gets faster for 2011 and becomes the first round of the inaugural Hammer Down Crown four-round endurance race series.

The 2011 Denny's Woodhill 100 is considered a "sprint enduro" and will take the fastest racers in the sport on a 210km thrash through pine forests at Woodhill, northwest of Auckland, on Sunday, June 5.

The race is the longest, fastest one-day enduro in New Zealand. The new Hammer Down endurance race series puts the Woodhill in the spotlight as teams work to maximise class points and develop their race plans around the four events of the series.

The series enables racers to accumulate class points at the Woodhill, the Gwavas forest endurance race in Hawkes Bay a month later and the two-day Taupo 1000 held from August 20-21.

All teams arrive at the final round, the Peter Howell Memorial race at Maramarua on September 25, with an equal chance at outright series victory.

Also kicking off at Woodhill is a youth category endurance event called the Kiwitruck series and backed by rally driver and recent off-road racing convert Andrew Hawkeswood.

It caters to the new breed in off-road racing: rising race stars aged 7-15 who compete in a tiered one-make race championship.

The Kiwitruck racers will have a 30-minute endurance race of their own on a special course at the Woodhill start-finish compound.

For many of the sport's leading teams, the Woodhill race is also the perfect - and only - test for the coming Taupo 1000 two-day enduro - rated the fastest and toughest offroad challenge in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Woodhill also pits new American technology against the most successful Kiwi race car designs and teams.

Old Glory - the US's stars and stripes flag - could be proudly flown at Woodhill's podium this year with two leading unlimited-class teams running the very latest US-built desert race cars.

Recent Woodhill winners and defending Taupo 1000 champions Clive and Max Thornton of Whakatane will be top contenders in their new Desert Dynamics two-seater race car with Chev V8 power; Mt Albert's Alan Butler has finished upgrading his American-built Millennium single-seater from Honda power to a race-prepared Mitsubishi Evo turbo engine.

Locally-built race vehicles likely to challenge for the win include last year's race winning Nissan Titan V8, a supercharged V8-powered, four-wheel drive race truck built by South Head's Raana Horan.

Horan is aiming to repeat his historic 2010 result, which marked the first outright win at Woodhill for a truck team. Darryn Bell, winner of Class 6 in 2010, has confirmed he will contest the Woodhill in his TVR-powered Range Rover. Another team will bring a new unlimited-class car and one of the smallest race cars in the field to this year's race. West Harbour's Greg Hogg also has a new V8-engined unlimited class car that will make its competition debut at the race.

His son, Taine Carrington, 13, will race at Woodhill for the first time in a VW-engined class 7 Challenger car.

Beachlands racer Neville Smith is hoping to enter his Cougar Honda turbo, providing he is able to repair the differential he destroyed at the first round of the national championship.

The advanced Cougar makes extensive use of carbon fibre and composite materials and is the ultimate expression of the race design that has dominated New Zealand offroad racing for two decades.

The reputation of Woodhill's tough one-day sprint enduro has spread across the Tasman and Dixon family team (Roly and son Tom) are working to get their Chev V8-powered unlimited class car to the race.

Organiser Donn Attwood says racers come to Woodhill with many aims. "The blend of fast open logging highways with rough sandy tracks through the trees are either a racer's dream or a nightmare," Attwood said.

"You can be blasting down Coast Rd at 180km/h or more and then swerve off into a goat track barely wider that your car, then be back to top speed again in a matter of seconds."