Ken Block Gymkhana World Tour 2011

So as part of his world tour, Kenny B paid a visit to Melbourne, Australia to hoon around Calder Park Raceway and put on a free show.

Here's the setup at Calder Park, with a course that ran down part of the drag strip and on to the final corner of the circuit.

The crowd.

Ken doing what he does best.

There was other entertainment too in the form of stunt bikes, drift, drag and off road cars; interspersed between sessions of Ken Block sliding around and smoking up the course.

And finally, there was just too much Ken Block for this bin to handle.  A fun few hours of free entertainment.

To finish up, here are a couple of videos of the action.

[Video] Exe Crew Motorkhana - DECA Shepparton

Here's a video of me versus my girlfriend on one of the courses.  Thanks to Agnes for recording it.

Exe Crew Motorkhana - DECA Shepparton

Exe Crew ran their first motorkhana event on Saturday (26th March 2011).  The event was held at the DECA training facility in Shepparton (Victoria, Australia) consisted of two main parts - motorkhana on the skid pan and hill climb style time trials on the "long wang" and "mini wang".

Some people take motorkhana very seriously and are adept at maneuvering their car around the cones with what seems like such ease that it's deceptive.  For a noob like me, I take the opportunity to practice controlling my car control rather than focusing on how fast I can complete the courses.  Most importantly, it was great fun.

I should have a video of one of my runs up here soon.  In the mean time, here are some photos by the Noisy Ninja.

Thank you to Anja Andrews for the two photos above.

Motorkhana - DECA Shepparton

Another new experience - my first time on the skid pan. We started the day with two different cone courses to maneuver through. It was so fun right from the beginning, I learned to use the handbrake to spin the car around. I also learned more about the car's braking limits.

Next up, a slalom course was formed with the cones. From weaving the car through the cones, I believe that the Z is a fairly nimble car even though it's heavy. The torque also helps as you can just apply throttle at appropriate moments and it will pull.

The final activity of the day was the most fun. The skid pan was sprayed with water and the cones were arranged into a huge circle. We could then driving around the circle and get the car into a slide by inducing some oversteer. After a few laps, I started getting the hang of it but there is still many hours of practice required before I will be able to hold the slide. This exercise was very beneficial because I now know what the car feels like when it loses control, and hopefully it will help improve my driving on the track in future.

Thanks must go to d-mag for the time and effort organizing the day and running it so smoothly.