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Sprint Gas Racing have announced their driver pairings for the Enduros, starting with the L&H 500 at Phillip Island in 9 days time. Team member Jason Richards will make his 100th Championship start and is enthusiastic about the team’s chances as he gets ready to share the drive with team mate Greg Murphy.
“The team has been working towards the endurance rounds all season; I think we’ll be fast,” said Richards. “We’ve put a lot of work in to the development of these cars. My car has qualified in the top 10 for the past four rounds and we’ve had good race pace.”
Extensive damage suffered at Winton Raceway caused $80,000 of damage to the number 3 Commodore and repairs are still underway but there is no doubt that the car will be back to its racing best for the L&H 500. Greg Murphy has also shown his support for the damaged car.
“I’m more than happy to be driving a car other than mine,” he said. “It’s not like I haven’t done this before, I drove car 15 (Rick Kelly’s) in the 2004 endurance campaign.
“Jason’s car has a good chassis set up and has shown strong speed; we all agree that car #3 gives us the best opportunity to win.”
Team Manager, Jeff Grech, is confident that having Murphy and Richards together in the same car will maximise their chances of Championship top ten finishes come December and the series finale at Oran Park.
“I think that Greg and Jason are two of the most impressive drivers in the Championship,” he said. “They work well with each other, they have good ideas and they complement each other’s driving style; pairing them was a no brainer.”
“All componentry has been checked and double checked,” he continued. “The preparation by the team has been some of the best I’ve seen in my career.
“We hope that our efforts produce results at both Phillip Island and Bathurst and that we take some good form through the final several rounds of the season.”
Greg Murphy has stood on the top step of the podium at Bathurst four times so far in 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2004, and Jason Richards came in runner-up in 2005. The 2007 Bathurst campaign saw them pair up to finish a very respectable fourth.
“The team has traditionally been strong at Phillip Island and Bathurst and both circuits rate as favourites for Murph and myself,” Richards said. “The endurance rounds tend to bring out our best. I think we proved at Bathurst last year that we should not be discounted.”
Greg Murphy’s number 51 Holden will be taken over by Mark Noske and Dale Woods for the enduros.
With the endurance races just around the corner, the V8 Supercar teams are readying themselves for this energy sapping and important part of the championship.
A vital part of the teams’ preparation is their choice of co-driver for each of the full-time drivers, and ensuring that these, sometimes rookie V8 Supercar ‘blow-ins’, are as ready as possible for the challenge the enduro races can bring.
Imagine: two drivers, a V8 Supercar and a six hour race around Mount Panorama at Bathurst. It’s a situation which has beaten even the best touring car drivers in the world; not quite the Sunday afternoon drive most of us occasionally indulge in.
One team taking the opportunity to perfect their preparation and ready their drivers is the HSV Dealer Team, with front men Paul Dumbrell and former V8 Supercar Champion Rick Kelly, who recently held a test day at Winton Raceway, which also included co-drivers Dave Reynolds and former V8 Supercar driver Paul Radisich.
A variety of weather conditions were also involved, typical of Victoria, and these were welcomed by the crew as being good preparation for the potentially unstable conditions expected during the upcoming races at the L & H 500, Phillip Island and Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000.
Team Manager, Erik Pender was positive following the test day. “You always go testing with a plan and the weather changed that a little bit for us, but we were able to do a lot of dry running, and also a lot of wet running,” he said.
“The co-drivers for our team, Dave Reynolds and Paul Radisich, managed to get a lot of miles in.”
“Paul and Rick were happy to give their respective co-drivers a lot of time in the cars, even though it is one of only four test days we get during the year,” he said.
“Because of the changes in weather during the test day we have a lot of confidence going into the enduros. Certainly you would expect the conditions we had during the test would be similar to the weather at Phillip Island.”
The HSV Dealer Team, along with pretty much all the other teams, are now in ‘endurance mode’, according to Pender, although he admitted that the traditional endurance race has changed in recent years, becoming more of another sprint race. He is also confident that the brake problem which adversely affected the team at last year’s Bathurst would not be a factor this year and is expecting a competitive result.
“We don’t have to change much on the cars; they’re built to do the distance,” he said.
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Recent research published online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences has identified an interesting correlation between maternal diet and the ability of parents to be able to have a hand in selecting the gender of their baby.
Studies completed at St Mary’s Hospital at Portsmouth in the south of England have shown a substantial link between increased nutrient intake before and in the early weeks of pregnancy, and the prevalence of male babies. Scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Oxford have examined the eating habits of 740 women, using questionnaires to determine their usual dietary intake before pregnancy and accurate food diaries to keep track of the women’s dietary intake during the first 28 weeks of gestation.
The women were all in their first pregnancy, avoiding potential skewing of the results due to previous childbirth, which has been shown to also have an effect on offspring gender. The women also had no known medical problems (including obesity) and the random sample also included a proportion of smokers equivalent to the proportion of smokers in the general community.
Results from the study showed that women with a higher nutritional intake before pregnancy and in the early weeks, in particular those who enjoyed cereal for breakfast every day, were more likely to have a boy. Girls were born to women with a lower nutritional intake, especially those who tended to skip breakfast.
The study also showed that there was no determinable correlation between a baby’s gender and socio-demographic situation, anthropometric characteristics, smoking status, caffeine intake or Body Mass Index (the ratio of weight and height often used to determine a person’s body fat and obesity value).
One possible reason for these results is the link between glucose levels in the body and foetal sex. It’s well documented that missing out on breakfast extends the usual period of night time fasting, naturally depressing glucose levels in the body. Previous studies have shown that that decreased glucose in the mother’s body enhances the chance of producing female offspring. The more glucose, the better chance of having a boy. It’s unknown why this is the case.
It’s also been shown that in times of hardship, when nutritional food has been tougher to come by, there has been a prevalence of females being born. This is likely due to the fact that female babies are smaller and lighter (on average) than male babies, meaning that the maternal body needs less nutrients to sustain an unborn girl than a boy. It’s well documented that in times when food is harder to obtain, more girls are born than boys.
Funnily enough, over the past few decades there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of girl births in relation to births of boys, which are declining. This is likely due to the change in eating habits in the developed world, which tend to be less nutrient rich than in decades past. There is also a habit, especially in young women, of missing breakfast which ties in with the slight rise in female births.
It’s an interesting thought that we might finally be getting to a stage in our development where we can actually have a say in the gender of our offspring and that by eating cereal for breakfast every day you can raise your chances of having a boy.
"If a mother has plentiful resources then it can make sense to invest in producing a son because he is likely to produce more grandchildren than would a daughter. However, in leaner times having a daughter is a safer bet," stated Dr Fiona Mathews, co-author of the study and member of the School of Biosciences at Exeter University, England.
To read the report in detail, click here.
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A while ago I wrote an article on this website about one of my favourite actors from the 1980s, Jon Blake (real name Paul) who suffered a terrible accident after filming his final movie, leaving him with an acquired brain injury.
Jon Blake in character
This time of year, with ANZAC Day almost upon us, I tend to think about Paul and his accident, often digging out my DVD of the Australian miniseries, ANZACS, and watching it for the umpteenth time. In the series, Paul’s character, Flanagan, joined the Australian Infantry as a Gallipoli reinforcement following the first major battle of the campaign and Flanagan is actually based on a real person from that time
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Garth Tander has done it again, reminding V8 Supercar fans just why he is the reigning series champion, taking out all three races in the inaugural Hamilton 400 last weekend.
Jamie Whincup, who was sitting pretty on top of the points table before the round began, had a major racing incident during qualifying after coming together with Todd Kelly’s Commodore halfway through the second session. A passing move went horribly wrong for Whincup when Kelly, with nowhere else to go, speared across the track off the ripple strip, clipping Whincup and sending him crashing into the wall. The car was so severely damaged that the weekend was over before it had even begun for the #88 Team Vodafone driver
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After almost three years in the making, the newest circuit on the V8 Supercars program has finally been completed, ready for this weekend’s round of the 2008 Series.
The street circuit in Hamilton, New Zealand, was first conceived in July 2005 when the then Mayor, Michael Redman, approached V8 Supercars Australia, attempting to convince them of the viability of a round in his beautiful city. By January 2006 a helicopter flyover had located a suitable circuit and the planning began later that year
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Not that he ever went anywhere but fans of the Tasman Motorsport driver could be forgiven for wondering just what has happened to Murphy over the last few seasons.
This coming weekend’s round at Hamilton, New Zealand, will see not just a new paint job for the Kiwi racing favourite, get beyond the skin and Greg Murphy will be roaring around in a car described as being totally different from any other car Tasman have given him in the past
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Former Garry Rogers Motorsport driver Dean Canto has spoken out following being dumped from the team and replaced with 2007 Fujitsu Series runner-up, Michael Caruso, for the 2008 V8 Supercar championship.
In an interview for the V8 Insiders Podcast show, Canto pointed the finger, stating there were a number of drivers in the main championship who were not there on talent alone, buying their way into major teams and pushing out other, less cashed-up, drivers, like himself and Steve Owen
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Following Holden’s success at the Sprint Gas V8 Manufacturers Challenge at the 2008 Australian Grand Prix, and the somewhat dubious decisions made by a number of the Ford drivers which resulted in numerous DNFs throughout the weekend, Ford Racing boss Ray Price has stood by his decision not to assist Falcon drivers with tactics designed to win races, including the non-points round, and ultimately the championship.
Jim Beam Racing’s Will Davison has prompted the comments form the Ford Racing Manager, after stating that the Red v Blue format has “a lot of potential to work as long as we are briefed properly by our manufacturer”. His main complaint being that the team as a whole received no direction from Ford regarding how to best tackle the new race format
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V8 Supercar drivers are joining together to call for an extended presence at future Australian Grand Prix race meetings. The success of the Sprint Gas V8 Supercar Manufacturers Challenge at last weekend’s AGP has seen a number of high profile drivers call for more laps per race for Australia’s premier race cars at the international event, with an ultimate view to making each race similar in length to a standard championship race meeting.
This is despite the fact that this year’s AGP saw the V8s race an extra ten laps when compared to their last visit in 2006. In total, 49 laps were raced in the Manufacturers Challenge, not too far short of the 58 laps the Formula 1 cars raced
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