FIESTAS STEAL THE SHOW AT KIRKISTOWN’S RETURN
Warm sunshine and some equally heated on-track action marked the return of racing to Northern Ireland after the long lockdown.
And while fields weren’t exactly massive, there was enough close racing to entertained the small race-starved crowd 500MRCI, with members only allowed to attend.
The closest contests of the day involved Fiesta Zetecs, with Mark Stewart and Neville Anderson scoring one victory and one second place apiece. What was impressive was the fact that the combined race times (unofficial) would have given an aggregate win to Stewart by 0.7 seconds after half an hour of cut-and-thrust racing.
In the concurrent Mazda MX-5 encounters, the wins went to Paul Sheridan in race one and newcomer Gregory McMillan in race two.
Jordan Dempsey (Van Diemen RF00) won the first FF1600 race after a fight for second between David McCullough (Van Diemen RF01) and Alan Davidson (Mondiale M89S). Davidson snatched the place at Colonial on lap four only to spin, and be collected by the Ray of Neville Smyth, the latter making his race return after several years away.
At the restart. Dempsey managed to keep McCullough at bay all the way to the flag but any hopes of a repeat victory were quashed when the red
Van Diemen pulled off after just four laps of race two leaving McCullough to cruise to victory. Ryan Campbell’s Reynard took the runner-up spot.
Elsewhere on the programme there were double victories for Jim Larkham (Radical) in Roadsports and Ciaran Denvir (Civic) in a poorly supported saloon encounter.