2014 F1RMGP 24 Hour V8 Bathurst Enduro
The first F1RMGP 24 Hour V8 Bathurst Enduro was held in 2014, at the Mount Panorama Circuit, Bathurst, NSW, Australia.
Entries
Representing the top teams of the F1RMGP crop were newly re-crowned Constructors' Champions Viking Racing in a Holden, in-house challengers Formula One Rejects Motorsport in a Ford, bringing legendary double-champion HWNSNBM back into the driving seat, and representing the Japanese in a Nissan, Super Aguri Enduro, slightly renamed to fit the event. The Women's European Cup champions, Scuderia Minardivas, were guaranteed a drive in this race and chose the second Ford, with the Vikings running a women's subsidiary team, named Valkyrie Racing, in the second Holden. With the other two Japanese F1RMGP teams, Leyton House and Dome, unable to field an all-Japanese line-up, they were denied access to the lead Nissan, hence they combined their resources to run the second car under the name of Leyton Dome Racing.
All four F1RMGP Champions - HWNSNBM, Chris Dagnall, Þorvaldur Einarsson and Vanina Ickx - were entered for the race by the teams they were associated with throughout 2014. Seven further champions from the F1 Rejects universe were also found along the entire length of the grid: Daniel Melrose and Douglas Mann, champions of the defunct F1 Challenge Championship (actually a virtual racing championship); 2011 REECCS champion, Niko Bellić, driving for Aeroracing Engineering; 2011 LFS Cup champion, Shinobu Katayama, driving for Team Sunshine Infiniti; 2012 F1RWRS champion, Pippa Mann, driving for Foxdale Auto Racing Team; 2014 F2RWRS champion, Mitchell Macklin, driving for Virgin Melrose Racing Team, and 2014 Rejects of LFS champion, Cave Johnson, driving for Team Ultimate.
Elsewhere on the grid, shady business dealings led Scuderia Andrea Coloni to team up with Scuderia Alitalia to form Scuderia Alitalia Andrea Coloni, and nobody who has ever driven for either team in the F1 Rejects universe selected for this race - Gabriele Tarquini and Enrico Bertaggia were poached from other F1RMGP teams, justified due to their previous Coloni connections. Meanwhile, their subsidiary, Telecom Italia Trueba Corse, entered "the most shamelessly rude and scandalously reject driver of all time", Giovanni Roda, to cause havoc at the back of the grid. F1 Rejects universe stalwarts such as Thomas de Bock, Aurélien Moll, Mirko Bosević, Phoenix McAllister and Kay Lon jumped at the chance to tweak the noses of the F1RMGP big boys, while Yuka Katayama signed at the last minute for the Psycho Soldiders team to at least attempt to show her champion sister a thing or two. Ben Fleet was also a last-minute signing, in the same team as long-time girlfriend Pippa Mann, and the paddock had to be treated to the dubious sight of them holding hands and skipping through the garages in a nauseating display of coupliness.
Despite former F1 driver and nearly-F1RMGP driver Ukyo Katayama filling the third seat for Super Aguri at the sharp end of the grid, three Katayamas in the race still wasn't confusing enough, it seems. Because, along came James Davies - three of them, to be precise, from the 1995 F1RGP2C, 2003 NASCAR and 2014 F1RWRS seasons. As if Dr Francesca Rimmer didn't have her work cut out running the Hologram Projection Unit so that Hitoshi Ogawa and the legendary Peter Brock could drive despite both being dead, she now had to find a way to bend the laws of space and time to allow 2003 James Davies to appear in the same place at the same time as his future 2014 F1RWRS self without causing a temporal paradox. Being a genius, she succeeded and Team James Davies competed in the race as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
The Back To The Future connotations did not stop there, either, as the X9 garage for experimental cars was filled with a 33-year-old DeLorean DMC-12 entered by West Cliff Racing. And, not content with entering the first REECCS Drivers' Champion into the field, that series contributed one of its cars, as well - an equally ancient Trabant 601 entered by Cillit Bang! Trabant Factory Team in garage Y9, "the car that made the REECCS so popular", with the car's communist origins reflected by running under the flag of Stalinist North Korea. Pedro Chaves, Perry McCarthy, temporarily released from their contracts with Scuderia Andrea Coloni, and the incomparable Roberto Moreno, a former Andrea Moda driver in both F1 and F1RMGP, were chosen to drive the Trabant due to their enormous combined experience at driving utterly rejectful cars - and they'd need it.
After qualifying, Melrose was unceremoniously dumped by his Manager after she ended their month long relationship. The Australian's furious trashing of the Virgin MRT garage meant that he was removed from the entry list by his team and replaced by V8 Supercar enduro specialist David Besnard for the race.
Qualifying
Three qualifying sessions were held on the afternoons of Wednesday 10 December - Friday 12 December, 12:00 - 15:00. Each driver participated in one session, as nominated in the order above - driver 1 on Wednesday, driver 2 on Thursday, driver 3 on Friday.
Race
The race took place between 12:00 on Saturday 13 December and Sunday 14 December.
According to the rules of the Enduro, the drivers were due to drive in the race in the order they participated in the qualifying session. With Daniel Melrose due to take the start line before his ignominious ejection, Virgin MRT were eventually granted an exception to switch their order, Mitchell Macklin driving the first leg instead of the third, so that Besnard's seat fitting could be carried out to exact safety standards, and to allow 26 cars to take the start. Dean O'Lauchlan was unchanged in driving the second leg, with Besnard driving the third. All the other teams, fortunately for Sir Bernard Shekelslike's blood pressure, were unchanged.
In a dramatic last-lap battle, the all-Belgian squad of Gillet ENB would evantually won from the Leyton-Dome car. Ultimately, ENB's pit garage's went on fire after the race. It was latter attributed to a chip pan, when the team attemped to prepare Belgian chips for themselves.