King of the Hill 240

A report from the crew of 747

What a fantastic weekend we had!

Lawn Doctor - owned by Liz and Dave Parker - has been our Main Sponsor for three years. They really poured it, on supporting our sport and the team with an impressive outfit for Brookton - big transporter, a Landcruiser ute full of firewood, lovely lamb for the pot and a huge crew to cheer us on as we tried our best to keep MOW-747 circulating while the field of big dollar machines started to break up. (hard luck to a couple of mates Davin and Dave with breakages - the track was rugged)!

We left Perth around 7.30 am Saturday; arriving in Brookton around 10am. The stunning girls in our support crew and our Sponsors arrived later in the day. Mark, Glenn and myself pitched tents, set beds and got the fire on the go for the Saturday night pot roast dinner. The transporter then became the workshop for the weekend with generator, music, lighting and enough tools to carry out a full engine rebuild.

We put up a competitive prologue on Saturday afternoon - or at least we were happy with it. Crewman Mark thought I could have pushed harder and decided to check if I had full throttle on both carbies. He discovered we were running on half throttle and we were quick to modify the stopper on the floor. Thanks to Mark's thinking it made a big difference later Sunday.

The rest of the crew arrived around 3.00 pm but the fun didn't start till Saturday night with a great feed and Dave's quality taste in music.

Sunday morning, 5.30 and Glenn's mobile phone is doing some crazy song and dance to wake us all up for work. The smell of bacon and eggs fill the air. After battling the cold over night and Rob from ARB reporting nearby town recording ~2 degrees and ice formed on the race track we were keen to stoke the fire a little.

By 9 am or so we were well and truly into the racing mode. It was great to see such strong support for our team with ARB ex Director Lionel McPherson and Jeanne, ARB's Russell and Cristina, Michael and some good friends, Clive, Tania Weston and Family and Robbie and his wife from Lawn Doctor all turn out to cheer us on.

The second round saw us destroy another 30 + year old gear box, well in this case we think the High / Low range selector has broken and or shaved the roll pin out, the transfer case just wont hold in range, I had to drive 4 x 20km laps with my foot on the lever to avoid it kicking out. Not giving up we pushed on to finish 2nd in class and somewhere in the top 15 surviving vehicles.

A great time was had by all and we are looking forward to racing at Harvey on Saturday July 8th from 4pm to 10.30pm. I hope you will all support the Western Desert Racers as we have an opportunity to save this venue for future racing so close to Perth!

I can say that after three years of racing I finally managed to get about 40 mins of brilliant in-car footage and plan to have a video night / bbq here in the near future.

Steve Armour

RETURN