Luke Nieuwhof and the Nieuwhof Family Racing team have quickly found their groove with the 60foot Kawasaki, taking a win in Modified Bike at the second round of the Aeroflow Sportsman Drag Racing Championship.
After only recently returning from two years away working for the Australian National Drag Racing Association, it was a combination of a consistently tuned race bike, good reaction times and plenty of luck that saw the team take home one of the first ANDRA silver Christmas tree trophies.
In the final round against Justin Townson the team got perhaps one of its luckiest ever runs when Townson broke a chain on the hit of the throttle. Shortly afterwards the 60foot Kawasaki began to misfire and only ran a nine second time.
“Out of the corner of my eye as I launched I saw Justin not really going anywhere, but my mind was immediately back on my pass when the bike started misbehaving,” Nieuwhof said.
“I was hanging on just hoping that Justin wouldn’t recover, not knowing that he had broken the chain. I kept having a look around and couldn’t see him and as soon as I crossed the finish line I knew we had got very lucky.
“As Gary Phillips often says, I’d rather be lucky than good. And that was certainly the case.”
The 60foot Kawasaki top qualified for the event with an 8.421, narrowly holding off second placed Clinton Urban who ran 8.422.
It proved to an important thousandth of a second, providing a first round bye in hot conditions on Saturday which the team chose to simply stage for.
“We pretty much never just stage for a run, we always like to make a pass to get more information about how the bike is performing,” Nieuwhof said. “But with the heat and a five hour gap between first and second rounds we weren’t going to learn a lot and it was only going to put stress on the equipment and the team.”
The run of luck continued through the second and third rounds with red lights from Paul McNamara and Phil Paton before the semi final against Roger Harris.
“We had a great close race against Roger,” Nieuwhof said. “We got a small advantage on the start line and it was neck and neck for a while there.”
The win puts the Nieuwhof Family Racing team into the lead of the Aeroflow Sportsman Drag Racing Championship. Luke said it was all down to his father Paul, a former Modified Bike national champion, mother Julie and crew member Greg Pickering.
“My dad is amazing, there is not much about drag bikes he doesn’t know and without him there is no way I would be racing a bike as good as the 60foot Kawasaki,” he said.
“Even in the heat we try and enjoy our racing as a family, the drags is all about having fun and doing something we all love.”
Nieuwhof Family Racing thanked sponsors 60foot, FME and Glenway Signs, Graeme Cowin and the team at Aeroflow for their support of the sportsman series, ANDRA and the Perth Motorplex track staff for delivering a safe track even in the heatwave conditions.