Maurice Fabietti won Australia's quickest ever Top Doorslammer bracket.

 “This is just a dream come true,” a stunned Fabietti said after the event. “With such big fields sometimes don’t make it and end up doing well in the consolation bracket because we make a major change.

“After the second qualifier we thought - we’ve got nothing to lose so we’ll make a major change before the last qualifier. It ended up working and we made it into the field. Some good lights and some fine tuning before each round we ended up running that 6.000 in the final and thanks to the holeshot we beat John (Zappia),” he proudly added.

“This is the first Christmas Tree I’ve won since the Winternationals in 1989,” an emotional Fabietti recalled  [ANDRA has a Christmas Tree trophy for its event winners – Ed]. “While a five-second time slip would have been the icing on the cake the fact that we qualified in the quickest field ever, won the race and took out two other competitors five-second runs with holeshots is plenty good enough,” he went on to say.

WSID put on a consolation bracket for non-qualifiers of the Top Doorslammer bracket. The biggest shock from this came in the first round when diminutive female driver, Kath Stevens became the third person on the weekend to run a five with a 5.968 when defeating team mate Steve Packman in the first round of that bracket. I recently published a book on her husband Brett Stevens and spent quite a lot of time with the pair last year and this lady is no pushover, let me tell you.

Having served in the Army in East Timor in the recent past Kath knows all about team work and getting the job done. Last year her car broke something like 13 sets of wheelie bars as she would give her Jack Daniels-sponsored Ford Falcon a bootful. “The funny thing is that the run didn’t feel that quick,” she admitted. “That said it left the line hard, stayed in the groove all the way down and didn’t shake.”

Husband Brett’s car has a Motec computer in his and he normally shares data with Kath and Packman’s cars but his car doesn’t have wheelie bars so there are some differences.

“Sometimes its the untidy runs that you remember the most but that said I knew it had it could do it. My first qualifier yesterday saw me run the entire pass with out a shift light and I had to shut it down very early (but still recorded a 6.229 at only 195.85 mph). We had a couple of crossed wires when we went out later and didn’t make a run so this was the first time that I could make a full power run,” she added.

The consolation bracket was won by Sean Misfud’s Willys that had American Wild Bunch legend, Camp Stanley on the team (seen at back of the car in the photo). Also opponent Aaron Lynch crashed into the left hand side wall after it looked like he lost the steering on his Corvette after over correcting.

More class regionals coming soon.