MEDIA RELEASE: Te Puke’s Michael Scott has bounced back from his punishing rollover at the V8 Supercars race weekend in November where he destroyed his Toyota TR 86 race car in a high speed crash.
Scott, 22, was racing in the single make Toyota championship when he tagged another car heading up onto Pukekohe’s ‘mountain’ at 143 km/h.
The car was propelled sideways into the gravel trap, barrel rolling up and over the three metre safety ‘catch’ fencing and landing upside down on the pit lane side.
Shaken but uninjured, Scott walked clear of the wreck after a minute hanging in his safety harness upside down.
“I honestly don’t remember the crash after that initial slide across the grass. The next thing I remember is having a face full of gravel and climbing out of the car, wondering how I ended up in pit lane.”
Sore but unhurt, Scott was on a flight back to Christchurch the next day to revise for exams in his mechanical engineering degree.
Then just two weeks later he was on another flight, this time to Laguna Seca in California to contest a shootout for a Road to Indy scholarship.
“That was a bit of a hodge-podge event, we were just given a bunch of cars to run, but they were very different speed-wise. I was quicker in the first car I got than the next, and it was entirely random.”
Having bought Callum Quin’s TR 86 car from the previous championship, Scott undertook a mad sprint halfway round the world to get back to New Zealand in time to contest the second round of the championship at Taupo.
The new car was second overall in the previous championship; Quin has moved on to an NZV8 drive.
Scott was in the thick of the action all through the wet/dry/wet Taupo race weekend and emerged with sufficient points to maintain his fourth position on the championship table.
The Toyota 86s join the Toyota Racing Series and a host of other categories at Ruapuna, 13-15 January, for the next round of the summer series.
