Rod Salmon took out race two of the Production Sports at the Bathurst Motor Festival yesterday at Mount Panorama, but the race will be remembered for two crashes which ate up almost the entire hour-long race window.
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Salmon held off race one winner Neale Muston and Bathurst driver Brad Shiels to take the chequered flag, but not before several safety car periods.
The first of those came on the opening lap.
Robert Smith proved that after two days of rain playing havoc with the weekend’s racing, you don’t need the wet weather to bring on the carnage.
Smith lost control of his Ferrari 458 coming into Murray’s Corner and there was little that Andrew Richmond could do in his Ginetta G50 to avoid a collision.
After heavy impact between the two cars, both speared into the outside tyre wall, immediately bringing out a yellow flag.
The Ginetta bore the brunt of the impact, with much of the lengthy safety car period that followed spent cleaning up the pieces of its front end strewn across the final corner.
Racing got back underway with 29 minutes to go, but the safety car was back out almost instantly when Nicholas Marentis crashed in the second sector.
All that carnage meant Salmon needed little racing to score the victory.
The green flag came out with just five- and-a-half minutes to go, making it a frantic sprint.
Salmon led Muston and Mark Griffith into the final few laps of action.
His lead continued to grow over that remaining time and he ended up improving one spot on his result from Saturday.
“We were pretty confident that we could be the fastest car today. There were a couple of guys around us who mucked up yesterday who could have challenged us,” Salmon said.
“Neale Muston was certainly there for the challenge, but we had his measure today, which was good. We went side by side up Mountain Straight at the start and that was pretty exciting.
“It was a great race and I’ve got to say the competition was pretty good out there. The driving standards are the problem in this category.
“We haven’t had a race without a safety car. There’s Lamborghinis and Ferraris and they’re all smeared up against walls.
“I don’t get why some of the guys come here and treat it with the disrespect that they’ve done.”
It’s hardly a consolation prize for Salmon’s DNF at this year’s Bathurst 12 Hour – when he retired the Audi 103 laps into the race – but he says he will always be keen for a winning chance at Bathurst.
“The fact that it’s Bathurst is why I’m here. If it was a different track then I wouldn’t bother,” he said.
“I am chasing my third win at the 12 Hour. That is on my bucket list. Our best chances have been, every year I say it, for the last three years. We would have been on the lead lap at the end and the data showed it.
“Coming back here is a nice consolation. We had tyres left over, some medium compounds, so we thought we’d come up and use them.”
Shiels put in what was undoubtedly the drive of the race, his third place coming after he started from the rear of the field.
His local knowledge of Mount Panorama came to the fore as he pushed his Porsche past Griffith in the dying stages to take the unlikely podium finish.
