Qualifying was run in heavy rain, putting the more powerful cars and motorcycles at a disadvantage and producing some unexpected grid positions.
Brennon Green put the Weskaap Bakwerke Golf 5 on pole for the first Mike’s Place Clubmans Saloons race, ahead of Danie van Niekerk’s Wingfield Motors 325 E36, Bruce Meyer’s VW Polo GTi and the LVTS E46 of Rafiek Pather.
Van Niekerk, however, missed race 1 due to a mechanical problem, leaving Green and Pather to fight it out for line honours in treacherous conditions on the streaming wet circuit.
Green came home just
2.436 seconds ahead of Pather’s big BMW, with Class B contender Abduraouf Jacobs, better known at Killarney as Baby Jakes, third overall and first in class. Fourth, and leading Class C, was Meyer’s privateer Polo.
Race 2 was run on a (mostly) dry track; Van Niekerk was back with a point to prove and led every lap to finish almost six seconds clear of Green, with Wayne Wilson (DTM Helderberg Maxima) a further eight seconds back (and leading Class B) after a superb dice with Mansoor Parker in the Executive Decisions M5 and Baby Jakes.
It was a measure of how wet the circuit was that the top three Powersport 300 riders qualified ahead of the quickest of the Powersport 650s, as Slade van Niekerk (Prestige/GT Graphics R3), Jason Linaker (RST/Samurai Ninja 300) and David Lindemann (Fueled Racing/GM Contractors R3) annexed the front row of the grid.
And that’s where the excitement was in race 1 too, as Van Niekerk and Lindemann got into a race-long superb battle for the lead, never more than a bike length apart.
In the end, however, Van Niekerk was able to hold the Fueled Racing rider off, coming home less than half a second ahead, with Linaker third and Edward Rolstone (Kawasaki ER650) a distant fourth on the first of the bigger, more powerful machines.
Superbike star Trevor Westman was able to use the power of the Rockstar/AWR ER650 to good effect on a drying track in race 2, pulling out a commanding lead and finishing 22 seconds ahead of the field.
The circuit was almost completely dry for race 3, delivering a more conventional finishing order with the 650s of Westman, Franco Flach (Kawasaki ER650) and Andrew Thompson finishing in that order after Flach, who was fifth on lap one, mounted an impressive mid-race charge.
