Jack and Katrina's Place

For Katrina's birthday this year Jack decided to give her an out of the ordinary birthday present - a V8 Supercar Race Experience. It was a session with a racing instructor in the Holden V8 Supercar and she got to do 3 lots of x 4 laps around the Manfeild Race Track with a debrief session in between each set. She's had latent petrol-head tendencies for some years but manages to keep them under control most of the time, but having said that, she was more than a little bit nervous about this. Let's face it, a V8 Supercar is a far cry from the 1000cc Starlet, even the 2.3 litre Mazda 6 is quite a long way off the mark!

So in preparation for the big event we stayed the night in Feilding in a lovely little restored cottage and took ourselves off to Manfeild on Monday morning. Katrina was too nervous to eat much breakfast and was quite worried about either:
a.) stalling the car (the humiliation would be too much)
b.) crashing the car (doesn't bear thinking about)
c.) nana-ing around the race track and wasting such a marvellous opportunity to go hard

As it turns out, she didn't have to worry about any of these. She took to the driving like a duck takes to water - no nana-ing around for this girl! The instructor told her after one of the debrief sessions that she got up to 180kph on the straight so during the next set of laps she dared to take her eyes off the track briefy to see the speedo well over on the right hand side, definitely up around the 180-190kph area!

While speed was not the issue, a few technique modifications were necessary around the tricky corners but she managed a few really great laps at full noise and cornering nicely! I think the photos say it all!


Strapped in and ready for the instruction laps


Here she goes down the pit straight!

Her hair was wet with the sweat of concentration after the laps!