Hammer time for Hutchison at Manukau
That was impressive. Noah Hutchison, current NZ2, spent the summer tuning and rebuilding his Yamaha YXZ, took it through dyno work at E&H Motors in Pukekohe and the hard work paid off in spades.
He scored first place with two wins, one being the feature. He also posted fastest lap of the day and (unofficially) also reset the outright lap record for Colin Dale Park. What more could a racer ask for!
I have a strong suspicion that the lap record was previously owned by none other than Carl Ruiterman, ace Yamaha builder and multiple New Zealand outright champion. Carl set the mark at the 2025 Mickey Thompson Offroad Grand Prix, where he dominated the S-class UTV heats, leaving the pursuing pack so far behind in most heats that his dust had settled before they emerged onto the front straight. He won the class ahead of Aaron Rogers and Dave Templeman and set an outright lap record of 56.00sec in the process. That's pretty fast.
So Noah’s well in the frame to be champion in the new UTV open class, which somebody decided would look nice if it was called class two.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. Noah says the day started “not good at all.”
During the engine rebuild he had replaced the IAT (intake air temp) sensor as a precaution.
“Unfortunately, we got a freak failure where the sensor was over-reading massively, making the ECU think our intake temps were 90+ degrees (definitely weren’t), which in turn makes the ECU pull stacks of ignition timing which led to huge heat dumped into the coolant.”
Within the third lap of the first heat the water temperature was 120 degrees Celsius, forcing him to slow right up and just cruise to a finish.
Fortunately, he’d brought the old sensor along as a ‘just in case’ spare. After some deliberation he decided “let’s just throw it in and run it, see what happens.”
“To my surprise it went mega and fixed the issue completely! Car was on song and snagged the win in second heat!”
Later in the day getting ready for the in the feature Noah checked the UTV’s fuel level before heading out.
“It was reading 15.5 litres… should be plenty. Wrong, by the fourth lap it was starting to fuel surge hard on the corners. About half way through the race, I turned the boost all the way down through and just managed it through the corners where I knew it was bad. Completely my fault but luckily, we built a healthy early lead I could afford to bleed a second or so a lap and take the feature win.”
Just shows, no matter how much you prepare and review your prep, there’s always something to go wrong.
