The first race of Round 1 of the 2021 Gulf Western Oil Touring Car Masters Championship at Symmons Planes was the coveted Trophy Race, where in years gone by coming first could mean walking away with a camping fridge or Esky. The grid for this race is worked out on a complicated algorithm and saw Andrew starting out of grid position 5. Dropping back to 7th off the start, Fishtail felt better in the car than yesterday and was able to fight his way back to 5th position however this was short lived as Andrew had to skilfully avoid an incident in front of him which put him back as low as 12th. Not one to give up, Fishtail put his head down and was able to get back to 10th.
Hoping for a better result in the second race of the day – the official Race 1 of the Gulf Western Oil Touring Car Masters Championship, the Ford XY GT Falcon known as Abigail got a great start and Fisher manoeuvred the car from 11th position to 9th. Things were looking good with the car, but then it lost the power steering. With those big Hoosier tyres on the car it was a tough time but Fisher was determined to finish out the race however in doing so dropped down the order to be the last of the finishers.
After the race the team found that it was a rock that flipped the belt however more disappointingly a rock also caused damage to the exposed CAM timing belt of the brand-new engine. Sadly the damage on the belt was too much and the team deemed it was not worth risking damaging the engine and will retire the car for the weekend.
After Andrew was informed of the problem he commented, “It’s frustrating to have to pull out of the round but I’m very glad that the timing belt stayed in one piece, that would have been a very costly breakage. We will get this power steering system sorted so that we can regroup and get the Cam belt fixed and attack Round 2 which is going to be a great event yet to be announced, so watch this space.”