As we make a long overdue catch up with the fantastic GPO Challenge series, we make whistlestop reviews of each race and evaluate – will there be a changing of the guard as Jan-Moritz Kammann finds his early lead under attack left, right and centre? This is part one of four seperate articles about GPO Challenge that will be published over the next four days…

After Jan-Moritz Kammann took a very persuasive win at GPO’s inaugral race at Bahrain, he placed himself up on a pedestal as the man to beat. The rest of the field have obviously taken it to heart because they’ve being pulling every trick out of the book to make sure they do just that.

At Melbourne, Australia, many teams bought new drivers to try to knock Jan off the top spot. GridLINE bought along David Dominguez and Jack Nicholls, Scirocco unveiled Muhammed Patel, Williamson Dynamics were up to speed with Camilo Nino and of course, the rest of the field were now one race in and better prepared for a circuit they all knew.

In qualifying the form book was immediately upset with three of those new names taking the top slots, Nicholls ahead of Dominguez and Nino third pushing Kammann back to 4th. Laurent Vaisman another newcomer was 5th for Rothmans ahead of Fields, Drazen Cokor, Patel, Keith Doherty and Mihaljo Vicentijevic rounding out the top 10.

When the flag dropped however it was David Dominguez that jumped into the lead and blasted away from the pack. Nicholls slid to second before a fast starting Cokor demoted him to third, Patel and Kammann then got passed the Englishman too. Soon Nino and Fields were well in the action too, all of this to the delight of Dominguez who was getting away ahead.

However it was all to fall apart for several drivers. Jack Nicholls was to crash out 15 laps in, Nino suffered connection issues at half distance and Vaisman didn’t get passed lap 3. He would join a collection of drivers out at the start including BMB drivers Jordan Norwood and Gary Gray, Ari Kesseli’s Rice Racing car, Fredrick Arbegard for Redspeed and Sven Hesse for Millenium due to various maladies. Brian Cowley would crash out on lap 6, Graham Dickinson have technical issues on lap 11 with teammate Erick Davies DNF 5 laps later. The Williamson Dynamics group were going well until the second half of the race when Rizwan Sarwat retired with accident damage and Camilo Nino and Benjamin Chong retired on the same lap! That left 11 until Scott Beck too crashed his Rothmans out with 20 to go.

That left just 10 runners from the biggest GPO grid to date and they all scampered home to collect points.

David Dominguez had a relatively straight forward win on his first time out and caused a real paddock stir with his general demenour all race meeting. He obviously had the good to challenge for the title. Muhammed Patel’s second signalled a driver that was able to work his way up the field should he not have qualified well and had some good overtaking chops. Third went to Drazen Cokor who continues to show that he has some great talent that is being tapped into more and more each race. Championship leader and season opener winner Kammann managed only fourth, almost an entire lap down. Most certainly the battle axes had been drawn!

Just behind was Stuart Fields after a race of dueling with cars around him ahead of a delighted Vincentijevic who stayed out of trouble for an impressive 6th. A Rothmans duo of Keith Doherty and Brian Oates gave their team something to cheer for with 7th and 8th ahead of Heinz Vanderhoydonck who spent the weekend getting used to the car and drove well to grab 9th, 2 laps adrift. The final point went to Ben Ross who’d driven a careful but detirmined race to grab 10th, 3 laps down.

So Jan the Man was licking his wounds after what had been a hectic battle for the lower podium slots early on and coming out second best. New rivals had risen… what Sepang hold a new Shebang for our GPO Challengers? Malaysia comes tomorrow…

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