By David Ellis and Col Robinson, images by Team Torana - When You’re Hot You’re Hot

2022 brings the 50th anniversary year of Peter Brock’s famous first victory at Bathurst with the mastermind Harry Firth, who developed a small 6 pot Torana to take on and beat the big V8s. We acknowledged that feat by entering ‘Team Torana - When You’re Hot You’re Hot’ into the NSW Road Racing Club’s 6 Hour Regularity Relay event on March 12-13.

Six HSRCA members entered with their LC and LJ Toranas from across the board categories of Group Nc, Supersprint and Regularity. The team consisted of Paul Tierney, Hugh Zochling, Peter Kotz, Brad Robinson, Phil Hoad and David Ellis all capably led by Col Robinson as the team manager. The cars were quite popular in pit lane as it’s been a long time since a group of GTR and GTR XU-1s have been seen together displaying the bright Reds, Greens, Orange and White colours of the ‘70s.

The Event started with practice and qualifying on the Saturday in very pleasant weather conditions that we have not seen for a very long time, with not a raindrop in sight. This produced the perfect opportunity to stretch the legs and loosen up for the main event on Sunday. The program also included a sponsors and passenger session late on Saturday, which proved to be quite an eye opener for the family members that see us pack up for every race meeting, but never experience the thrill – well now they well and truly know.

Sunday was the big day and again the near perfect weather conditions prevailed. Team Torana - When You’re Hot You’re Hot was led out by the Peter Kotz GTR XU-1 and again the Lone O’Ranger orange car stood out amongst its peers on the starting grid.

With 33 team cars lined up on the grid and the 10:30am Start time fast approaching, the Sydney Motorsport Park crowd was entertained by a wonderful singing of the national anthem, by our very own Hugh Zochling. Well done Hugh!

Flag dropped and off they went, the garages bristling with excitement, as the next four or five cars from each team fuelled up and warmed up and drivers suited up - pulses raised.

The event proved to be surprisingly tough on cars as drivers went out for multiple 9 - 12 lap stints before coming in for a quick swap over to their next sequenced team car. This repeated all day until 4:30pm. We were not the only team to have a car or two drop out with some issue or another. The track time was plentiful and our drivers all commented that they were feeling the distance out on the track.

The day progressed with only a few safety car deployments, several yellow flags and one red flag. Discussions post-event revealed a high level of good driver behaviour and courtesy.

Our HSRCA members were having their first attempt at this event, and due to some great assistance by our crew, we finished 27th out of 33. Apart from the normal skill required in a Regularity event, this event has other challenges with vehicle rotation, refuelling, tyre changes and so on. Importantly, after 6 hours & 117 laps completed by our team, we suffered a total of only 2 penalty points (some teams received up to 60), so our drivers were very well behaved!

In summary, a great weekend, fantastic weather, good company and no bent cars. Just how we like it. To cap it off, we also picked up the Best Presented Team award.

Team Torana members would also like to acknowledge the hard working NSWRRC committee, who produced an extremely well run and presented meeting.

And last but most certainly not least – to the people who scrutineer, manage the dummy grid, wave the flags, control the pit lane, recover the cars, time the laps and do the other behind the scenes tasks – none of the above happens without you, be it NSWRRC or HSRCA events. THANKS!