| SM2 client makes a racing smash |
 SM2 client, Jonathan
Beikoff, the marketing assistant of Construction Skills Queensland
has an exciting life outside work, he is a racing driver for the Shane Beikoff Racing Team! Jono has been kind enough to share some of his
tales with us on his weekend racing at Round 2 of the 2008 Fujitsu V8Supercar Series at Goulburn’s Wakefield Park circuit.
"Our weekend started
off well, with Dad and the car going faster in qualifying than we had ever gone
at that track by over 2 tenths of a second. We moved up from 27th to 22nd in the
first 17 lap race, moved from 22nd to 20th in the second 17 lap race and we were
really looking forward to the 30-lap race three, as our car performs
exceptionally well over longer distance races compared to our competitors.
At the start of race
3, a car in 5th position lost control into the first corner and spun in the
middle of the track, dragging dirt onto the road and creating an enormous, thick
dust cloud. Any drivers further back than 10th on the grid had absolutely no
visibility going into the first corner whatsoever, and unfortunately in the
middle of the dust cloud there were 5-7 cars crashed together in the middle of
the track. Dad, being the cautious driver, slowed right down to almost 40km/h
going into the cloud, only to be confronted with a pile of stationary cars. He
hit these cars reasonably hard, which has done some minor damage to front end,
but the worst was yet to come, when a car behind went into this dust cloud at
almost 100km/h and hit our right rear, which lifted the car into the air and
spun it violently down the track. I was standing at this corner as a "spotter"
for Dad, and to see all this happen in front of my eyes was just sickening.
Dad was extracted
from the car using the jaws of life and was taken to the track medical centre
for observation and after an hour, they released him. He was suffering from mild
shock for most of Sunday/Sunday night, and has a sore/bruised right arm, but
he's fine.
Unfortunately the
same can't be said for the car. We're unsure of the full extent of the damage at
this stage, but it's at bare minimum:
We won't know the full damage until we strip the car
later this week and assess the structural damage. We don't believe the roll
cage/bars have been damaged, which is good, but the floor crinkle is a real
concern to us. The car has had damage bigger than this before, so we expect to
restore the car to original condition (eventually), but after our transporter
dramas of a few months ago, our financial resources are non-existent at this
stage. We're not sure on the full cost of this accident, but we expect it to be
between $20,000 and $50,000 to get it back on track. Our round-to-round "costs"
are normally around $20,000 per Round, and we've done the last few on just
$9,000 per Round, just to make it to the race meetings.
We're not sure at
this stage, but that's most likely the end of our racing year. As I said, we'll
know more next week once we've stripped the car, and we have the resources
(volunteer mechanics, panel beaters, contacts in the industry etc) to help fix
the car, but like I said the timing financially could not be worse."
|
We have plenty of time
(over 2 months) to repair the car for the next race meeting at Sandown (which I
was supposed to be driving at), but the finances just aren't there to make this
happen. We will eventually repair the car anyway, as it's useless to us as it
is, but we may need to look really really long term to make that happen. It's
very disappointing, as I was lined up to drive the next 3 events, including at
Queensland Raceway (Ipswich), which is our home event, and Dad was lined up to
finish the year at Bathurst. Unfortunately we don't have any sponsors to help us
with this cost, as all our sponsors on the car provide products/services for the
team at "mates rates" in exchange for signage on the car (i.e. Turbo Brisbane
does the turbocharger on our truck, K&H provide our paints, etc).
The
most unfortunate thing about it all was Dad was being overly cautious and the
accident was not is fault whatsoever, yet we've
ended up the worst affected out of the incident. That's motor racing I
guess.