“After leaving Hampton Downs Raceway with broken diffs, fires, and more, Kat Benson Racing finally conquers Hampton Downs Raceway with a PB and a win in Pro Street”

Hampton Downs Raceway has never been the luckiest track for Kat. With flames and explosions hindering previous rounds here, it’s a circuit that Kat has wanted to fight back. For the fourth round of the NZ Superlap Series, the stars aligned and the cogs connected — Hampton Downs wasn’t beating Kat this time around. From the outside, we noticed a big difference in pace, with flat-shifting gear-changes and deeper dives. The Burger Fuel Evo is sounding and performing like an animal. Kat gave us a run-down post-race;

Round 4 of the the NZ Superlap Series was meant to be at Pukekohe, which we were really looking forward too, but due to resurfacing we were shifted over to Hampton Downs, piggy-backing off of an Auckland Car Club event.

Hampton Downs has been a trying venue for us over the past two seasons. Out of four events, we had a catastrophic engine fire, diff explosion and after a dog-ring failure we had to run a standard gearbox last time we drove here.

Believe it or not, this hasn’t deterred the team one bit — it just made us more determined. My PB at the track has stood for the past four events, so my goal was to smash it this round which we did on the second session after some cool southerlies came across the venue.

I have dialled in the clutchless up-shifting which has helped immensely, dropping my times to the low 12s with a best of 1:12.1. Unfortunately, the car is geared quite low with the close ratio gearbox so the Evo was topping out up the main straight in fifth gear at 236km/h. An 11-second lap time is just within reach!

Our lap time during this round was enough to take the win in Pro Street for the weekend, giving us some valuable championship points! Thanks again to my sponsors and crew for all your help and support - Mega Love KBR XO

We’ll see you all at the NZ Superlap final, May 4–5!