Just on a country drive, with some added grunt
CAIRNS driver Murray Young admits he’s feeling “a little bit anxious” ahead of hitting the tarmac for the first leg of Targa Great Barrier Reef.
Young and co-driver Scott Griffin will compete in the GT Production class at the annual event, which starts today and wraps up on Sunday.
“I’m a little bit anxious,” Young said.
“We’ve spent probably three or four months trying to prepare the car for this and you just get worn down a little bit.
“But when we’ll be sitting in the driver’s seat and the green flag says go, I’m sure all that will be forgotten and we’ll just have a smile on our face.”
Young has beefed up his weapon of choice for this year’s Targa Great Barrier Reef, swapping the 1973 Datsun 180B he entered in 2019 for a 2012 BMW M3.
As such, he was expecting a different racing experience this time around.
“We’re going to have the windows up, the airconditioning on and nearly no road noise,” he said.
“Even though we’ve made this into a pretty good little race car, we left the hoodlining and the floor covering and all that stuff in the car.
“It’ll just be like a drive in the country – just a bit faster.”
He said he and Griffin were taking a simple goal into the three-day event.
“Our goal is actually, and this sounds quite weird, just to finish,” he said.
“This is the first time I’m racing a car that’s got 430 horsepower at the flywheel and I don’t want to do anything stupid. We won’t be going out there to prove anything because we’ve got nothing to prove.
“We just want to finish with a smile on our face, knowing we’ve had a good weekend.”
He said it was great that the event could go ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s a bit of a shame a lot of the southern competitors aren’t here, but we’re very lucky to be able to have this event in Far North Queensland,” he said.
“It costs a fortune to get to this stage and, in my case, because I had to prepare the car and paint the car, it was probably about 300 man hours.
“For it not to have gone ahead would have been very disappointing. Even up to a month ago, there was no positive fact that it was going to go ahead, so we’re very happy.”