Niall and I spent the day at the Sydney Olympic Park yesterday watching motor racing. A street circuit had been set up around the Olympic arena to host the last race of the V8 Supercar national series. (I’d happened upon the circuit earlier in the week while out on the bike and had fun doing a few laps on virtually closed roads.) V8 is the big thing in Australia, the nearest equivalent would be Touring Cars in Europe. The race cars use the bodies of standard saloon cars but with massive, powerful V8 engines. The noise is incredible! Despite the fact that the circuit was narrow and had short straights (think Monaco) the cars were reaching 250 km/hr - all very exciting.
This being Australia an earlier race had featured ‘Utes’ i.e. Utility Vehicles. As far as I know Utes are exclusive to Australia, they’re essentially flat bed vans and would normally be driven by workmen (aka ‘tradies’). I don’t think racing was foremost in the mind of the engineers who developed these vehicles so stability at 200 km/hr isn't their strength! It made for an entertaining hour.
We’re into the rainy season here and we’ve had thunder storms virtually every evening for the past two weeks, yesterday was no exception. In fact the deluge came early and ruined the main race, it was abandoned half way through. We had a good day nonetheless and felt we'd witnessed another slice of Aussie life.
