POWERBOAT: Bay race can revive series chances

DOUG LAING
Three-times Napier Offshore 100 powerboat race winners Richard Shores and Wayne Carson are gunning to do it again as this year's national drivers' championship throws up its biggest challenge off Westshore and Ahuriri on Saturday.
The Auckland-based pair's superboat Placemakers scored its most crucial win of the season in the fifth race of the eight-race series on Tauranga's inner harbour three weeks ago.
Carson (pictured below), who grew up in Napier, says Placemakers must win this weekend to stay in the hunt to regain the championship from Aucklander Peter Turner.
A win in Napier, considered the truest "offshore" race in the series, which is raced mainly on harbours (and includes a race on Lake Taupo), would also make up for the minor mechanical problem which last year cost Shores and Carson the race, and possibly the championship as well.
That race was won by Sleepyhead, albeit missing Turner for the day. It was the fourth time in the last four races that the Napier race had been won by the eventual champion boat.
Carson says: "I think if we win the last three races, and Sleepyhead finishes further back than second in any one, then we will win it. That is certainly what we are gunning for."
He says Placemakers should be ready for the expected heavier seas, with hopes that conditions do not reach the extremes of 2003 when the event was scrapped as the boats milled behind the starting point.
Turner opened the season with victory on Lake Taupo in January, a great debut for the latest boat to carry the Sleepyhead brand - a newly-built 34ft 1100hp New Zealand-designed Phantom catamaran.
Placemakers won the second race off Maraetai, and the third race out of Gulf Harbour was won by Pro Floors (Wayne and Grant Valder). Turner returned to winning form with maximum points on Wellington Harbour last month.
The field is expected to be the biggest ever for the Napier race, with 38 to 40 having started the earlier races in the series. Last year 24 boats started, slightly down on expectations.
The numbers, buoyed by the growing popularity of the Formula Honda Class, which races with other sports classes over 60 miles, have been the big feature of the series.
Among them are Havelock North couple Grant and Cynthia Garrity (Darrin McCormick Mike Pero Mortgages), recording their best placing on Tauranga Harbour, third of 14 boats in the class.
The only Hawke's Bay entry in the 100-mile classes is Finance Point, the monohull run by Southern Hawke's Bay farmer Bill Thomson and Napier race organiser Craig Parsons. The boat which Carson's brother, Tony, drove to the national championship in 1993, has not been in the major placings this summer.
Race organisers have had to organise two cranes to lift some boats into the water at the Napier Sailing Club on Saturday, where scrutineering starts at 8am.
The race starts at 1pm, with 12 laps around an L-shaped course heading anti-clockwise past Ahuriri, cutting back to head towards Bay View, then heading south towards Westshore. It will take about an hour, but less for the smaller boats doing the 60-mile or 30-mile courses.