Whanganui teams perform well in second round of PSP New Zealand Jetsprint Championships

Whanganui's Ross Travers and Amanda Kittow wound up third in the Sprintec Boats Group A class.

Whanganui’s ‘Poison Ivy’ team of Rob and Ange Coley got a standing ovation as they rode a perfect race to win the second round of their category at the New Zealand Jetsprint Championships in Featherston.

The busy rotation on the tight track at Featherston meant the teams had to be on their A-game to deliver the goods at the Tauherenikau Race Course.

In the MouthFRESH Superboats top six elimination round, the husband-and-wife team got the best time, before going on to win the final top three shootout.

The Coleys drove the track to perfection in that round, causing the crowd to stand up and cheer as they flew around the course to finish with a time of 48.062 seconds.

The bar was set high for Superboats defending champions out of Hamilton, Sam Newdick and Shama Putaranui. The pair came out firing, recording a faster first split than the Coleys, but they lost a mere fraction of time in the track’s last section, finishing with a 48.289 and giving the win to the Coleys.

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.