The victory with his wife in their up-to-1800 horsepower superboat had been a long time coming, Rob Coley said.
“We’ve had the packages, but they’ve always let us down. We’ll have a very big smile about this result for a while.”
He described the Featherston rotation as a “busy, tight track with quite a number of hairpins and some fast bits down the bottom end”.
In the Sprintec Boats Group A class, Whanganui’s Ross Travers and Amanda Kittow fought hard to get third behind teams from North Canterbury and Hamilton.
Travers drove superbly all day, and although he and Kittow had the runner-up time going into the top three, they ended up third-fastest after their final run.
The teams now have three weeks to make any repairs and fine-tune their boats in preparation for the third round at Whanganui’s Shelter View track on December 27.