Phillip Island 6 Hour

Mustang Motorsport Competed in the annual Phillip Island 6 Hour Relay this year with Mustang Owners Club team Mustang Revolution! The entries was Graham Bell in his 65 Fastback, Shippo in his Blue 65 Fastback, Rob Tuckett in his silver 65 Coupe and James in Craig’s 2015 Shelby GT.

The Phillip Island 6 Hour is not a race but a regularity event you must nominate a lap time and not go under this time. The closer you get to this time the more bonus point you receive. Essentially we all nominated 1:57.00 and we aimed to get as close to this time without going under, the name of the game is consistency if you go under a 1:55.00 the team and drivers receive heavy penalties. This was always in the back of our minds all weekend since the whole team had Very fast Pony’s capable of blowing strait past this time!

Saturday was practice and gave a chance for the team to get used to the cars on track and get a feel for what times we expect to do. Later in the day the team started to practice pit board tactics making sure we understood what we were doing for Sunday. In the afternoon Graham went out for his practice session and half way through his stint his GT350 started blowing smoke. Graham quickly pulled her into the pits by this point the engine ground to halt. After a quick diagnosis we could see it had done a head gasket and potentially dropped a valve.

This caused a dilemma since to compete you need to start with four drivers, Graham needed another car so quickly decided to put her back on the trailer and take her home and swap it over with his 302 Saleen Parnelli Jones.

Sunday morning, we arrive at the circuit. Graham had done the round trip home and brought along the Parnelli to compete only to discover it is ineligible since it must run a 4 point harness. We decided to share the Shelby GT and run James and Graham in the same car. This way we still had four drivers competing but with a three car team. This meant we had a shorter down time to let the cars rest between stints. And the Shelby GT would do double as many stints.

James Was chosen to be the first driver out and line up on the grid to represent team Mustang Revolution. In the first stint James Broke out with a 1:56.0262 This instantly put the Team on the back foot and would be a uphill battle to bring the team home with a decent finish.

Across the day The Team worked well together in the pits and on the track lapping fairly consistently considering the on track traffic. We were lucky to not have any more mechanical issues after Graham's problems on Saturday.

After a consistent 3rd stint managing the front tyres of the Shelby GT James managed to make back 31 bonus laps bringing his total to 55 for the day.

Mustang Revolution finished in 7th Place. With our sister team Mustang Random Racers Club in 8th.

Mustang Motorsport would like to thank the MOCA team for their help and support across the weekend!