Jorja holds upper hand in sister double act
GIRLS just want to have fun.
But there is nothing like a little sibling rivalry to make life interesting.
Jorja (16) and Brooke Storer (14) do not compete against each other in their daytoday lives but when the Christchurch sisters get behind the wheels of their 1640cc VW Challengers, it is a different story.
They have raced each other for the past seven years and the sisters’ rivalry was evident at Slim and Janina Slee’s Waitaki Valley farm near Kurow at the weekend.
The elite of Southern offroad racers gathered to compete in the 2018 New Zealand Offroad Racing Championship’s Southern Dirtfest.
‘‘I’m not all about winning, I’m just out there to have fun. The dirt and stuff is pretty cool,’’ Jorja said.
But she admitted she was ‘‘always trying to stay in front’’ of her younger sister.
‘‘I got in front of her every race today,’’ she said.
For her part, Brooke was not intimidated by the older male drivers she was racing, because ‘‘everybody’s here just to race’’.
But she would like to get in front of Jorja.
‘‘We’ve been competing against each other since we were in the Jclass [Junior
Kiwi trucks], so we’ve always been trying to beat each other and take each other out.’’
The last Southern run before the national final in Christchurch at Labour Weekend went ‘‘superbly’’, 2018 New Zealand Offroad Racing Championship media manager Mark Baker said.
The Slees’ track — a new one created for the championships — had turned out to be ‘‘probably one of the best ones in the championship’’.
‘‘Racingwise it’s been fantastic [with a] natural amphitheatre for spectators — they can basically see the whole track,’’ he said.
‘‘The drivers . . . we’ve got three or four here from the North Island . . . are absolutely raving about the track — fast enough for the big cars, but technical enough for everyone else as well.’’
Although there were a couple of rollovers, there were no ‘‘nasty crashes’’ on Saturday’s shortcourse, where 42 cars raced over three rounds of five laps of the 1.2km track.
Yesterday’s endurance race was held on an extended track on the Slee farm