The Atmosphere Of BMW's at Phillip Island Classic Festival of Motorsport

 

First meeting for the year, and let’s hope it’s not the last???

 This was a fantastic meeting and if you are a BMW enthusiast it was extra special as we had BMW’s from all over the world turn up for this meeting with 11 in total, 7 x E30 M3’s, 1 x E30 325, and 3 x 635csi’s.

 

We finished our last meeting at Sandown in 2019 with a slight vibration and it turned out the original tail shaft had play in the universal joints. Turns out it was not really up to the standard of what is required for Motorsport.

So a brand new tail shaft was made. It's now lighter and stronger than the original and performed faultless with no vibrations during the weekend.

 

Started the weekend with a huge grid of 38 cars (42 on the entry form), and I think we ended the weekend with still quite a large grid of around 30 cars and no accidents, so a very successful weekend by most competitors.

Straight into qualifying on Friday morning and we qualified third group C, so quite unexpected as we didn’t really push the car hard, but that position didn’t last long!

Race 1 on Friday ended with us down three places and now in sixth place as our competitors started to get into their mojo and we found it hard to keep up with the likes of Jim Richards in the sister car (635csi Group C JPS) twin cam and Paul Stubber from WA in the Harvey Marlboro A9X hatch who is always very fast.

Race 2, 3, 4 and 5 basically didn’t change positions as the rest of the field started getting engine and gearbox failures and other issues that was causing DNF’s and placing’s were only changed because of this.

 Another exciting moment was when we were able to give Micheal Mc Micheal (who drove the car back in 1983) and our spanner man Nathan a drive around the track, on the back of the display cars. Micheal even made the effort to fly down from Adelaide and spend the weekend with us to take up this opportunity to get behind the wheel once again.

It was a relaxed weekend for Team Peninsula BM as we had no issues at all, the car ran super reliable and we ended up 4^th place after a great weekend of racing.

We have not committed to our next meeting as the corona virus may change everything, so we will keep you posted on future events.

 

Thank you to all the people who turned up from local and interstate as its always great to catch up with our friends and customers.

Credit for images : Australian Motorsport Images & Phil Wisewood Photography