A second place finish in the inaugural Bordertown Cup at Tolmer Speedway on Friday night and a fourth finish in the Australian Masters last Saturday night at Speedway City was how Steve Lines’ weekend panned out.
The current South Australian champion took part in the debut of the Sprintcars at Tolmer Speedway and came away with a pleasing result of a second place finish behind winner David Murcott. After he had started the feature race from position four, Lines made his way through to second place and despite being within sight of Murcott he was unable to deny him of the victory spoils.
“It’s always quite tough visiting a track for the first time as you are flying blind early on in the night trying to find your feet,” explained Lines. “As the night wore on we got a better handle of both the track and the car and by the feature race we were pretty good but we didn’t really have too much to challenge Dave [Murcott] for the win and second place was a satisfying results for our team.”
The following night Lines, aboard his SA # 45 H.A. Young Plumbing backed J&J, travelled to Speedway City for the running of the annual Australian Masters and it turned out to be a tough night that ended up pretty strongly.
Lines had to qualify for the feature race via the B-main, which he won easily, and started from deep in the field, position 13, where he worked his way forward to finish just off the podium in fourth place.
“I didn’t really push too hard during my heat races as I was under the impression that your qualifying time counted towards the points but it didn’t and it caught me out,” said Lines. “We had qualified seventh in time trials, then finished third and fifth in both my heat races and that wasn’t enough to place me directly into the feature race. I had to take my spot in the B-main and that made the feature race task a little bit tougher but we got through it and recorded a strong feature race finish to complete the night.”
The next 2009/10 season event for Lines is going to be on Saturday night, November 21 at his home track, Mt. Gambier’s Borderline Speedway in South Australia, for the second round of the Eureka Garages and Sheds Super Sprint Series.