Blossom Meeting Closes In On Milestone
| 2 September 2016 |
| Tweet | |
The Blossom Sprint kart meeting in Hawke's Bay has been a fixture on the KartSport New Zealand calendar for as long as most current karters can remember. Longer in fact.
This weekend members of the KartSport Hawke's Bay club will run the two-day event at their Chemz Raceway kart track at Roys Hill on the outskirts of Hastings for the 49th time, with plans already well in hand for the 50th in a year's time.
Above: Ryan Wood (#NS) was a class winner at last year's Blossom meeting
pic -
Fast Company/Vicky Jack
With its traditional first-weekend-in-September date the Blossom meeting heralds a new karting season with a unique two-day format which sees drivers from all over New Zealand race round the 687m track in a clockwise direction on Saturday then anti-clockwise direction on Sunday.
The meeting also has its own distinctive race format with each class getting four heats using pre-determined grids with points from all four counted and carried over on Saturday, and four heats on Sunday with three running predetermined grids and the fourth with a starting grid based on points scored up until that point.
Once those class races have been run and won each driver's worst performance over the eight class heats is dropped and class winners and place-getters are finally decided.
The Blossom event is the biggest on the Kartsport Hawke's Bay club's annual calendar and has a storied past, effectively spanning the history of the sport in this country.
The inaugural event was a road race around the streets of Hastings in the mid-1960s and over the decades it has been run in many different formats. One was a sprint meeting on the Saturday at the Roys Hill track then a road race on the Sunday just down the road at the Thunder Park drag strip which has now been turned into a vineyard.
Above: The 48th Blossom meeting in Hawke's Bay last year saw Jacob Cranston (#NZ) win Junior Rotax
pic -
Fast Company/Vicky Jack
Over the years Hawke's Bay has produced some of the country's best karters, some of whom - the likes of four-time Bathurst 1000 winner Greg Murphy and the late Ashley Stichbury, a two-time New Zealand Formula Ford as well as TraNZam and Touring Car champion - went on to further success here and overseas in cars.
That rivalry continues today, with their sons Ronan Murphy and Zac Stichbury regular competitors at the annual Blossom meetings.
