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Team Tander and Quinn win

10 November, 2014

 

Tony Quinn and Garth Tander win the Highlands 101 endurance race

Tony Quinn achieved one of the objectives he’d set himself for last weekend’s Highlands 101 race meeting when he and Garth Tander won the endurance race at Highlands Motorsport Park in dramatic fashion. As Quinn told us prior to the November 7–9 event he had his sights set on both the Highlands 101 race win and the Australian GT Championship title, and while he failed to eclipse Richard Muscat in the race to the Championship, a last-minute turn of luck saw him come up trumps on track.

The pair were coming second right up until the very last lap, following behind Richard Muscat and Craig Baird’s Mercedes-Benz, which had been in the lead for more than 90 laps of the 101-lap race. The Mercedes-Benz ran out of fuel only a few metres from the finish line meaning Quinn and Tander could pass them into first place.

When questioned about the last lap of the race Tander said, “The guys radioed me to say keep an eye out for the Merc, it’s going really slow. Coming out of the hairpin going up to the bridge, it wasn’t going at all, so I was yee-hahing on the radio as I went past and that was it. We were actually battling the Merc quite a bit after the earlier pit stop and we were close to going a lap down, but by staying on the lead lap and keeping the pressure on them, they pitted a lap before we did and that was the difference to buy us enough fuel to the line.”

During the 101 laps, Tander managed to break the Australian GT class lap record three times giving him a new lap record of one minute and 31.716 seconds. The same Aston Martin Vantage GT3 was used that Quinn previously won the inaugural Highlands 101 last year, with Fabian Coulthard, as well as taking out the Phillips Island 101 earlier this year with Tander. The weekend’s win marks a record-making three-peat of 101 race wins in Australian GT racing. 

 

1986 Pontiac Firebird

9 October, 2025

Seeing the car with his own eyes already had Scott fizzing, but when the curator of the car let Scott sit in the driver’s seat it became a truly unforgettable day. There was no way Bo and Duke’s orange stunt jumper could compete with this. To top it off, a photograph of him sitting in the car turned up in the local paper, so he started a new school with an added aura as the kid in the Knight Rider car.
Scott still thought about the Knight Rider car from time to time, but if he had not gone with his wife Abbey to the Selwyn Motor Fest in 2018, it may have remained just a treasured memory. At the show, Abbey asked Scott what his favourite car was as they ambled round. The man she had married instantly connected with his nine-year-old self, but in a deeper voice he said, “KITT from Knight Rider”. Had she just said, “That’s nice dear,” and left it at that, life might have continued as normal. However, unaware of the hole she was about to start digging, she said that she had never heard of it.

Blueprinting basics

3 October, 2025

You occasionally hear petrol heads tossing around the term ‘blueprinting’ when referring to an engine they have assembled, and have sometimes altered significantly. What they are probably trying to say is that their engine was carefully machined to optimum tolerances and balanced — probably for racing. But that isn’t what the term meant originally. You see, in the 1950s, when US stock car race cars really had to be stock, the racing teams would go to the factories and rummage through the parts bins until they found components that were closest in tolerance to the original blueprint developed by the engine’s designers.