For 62 years it has been the place for farmers to buy a new tractor, but Elmore in northern Victoria is set to be the new home of jet boat racing in the state.<\/p>\n
Described as rally driving on water, the roaring V8 Superboats navigate hair-raising turns at high speed, in short but intense races.<\/p>\n
The fast-growing extreme sport came to Australia in 1985, but Victoria hasn’t hosted events since a track in Melbourne’s outer west closed 15 years ago.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Justin Roylance racing his V8 Jet Superboat, Outlaw, at Keith in New South Wales. (Supplied: Justin Roylance)<\/p>\n
Australian champion jet boat driver Justin Roylance said he is excited about the developments at Elmore.<\/p>\n
“We had a few false starts over the last decade trying to get racing back in Victoria,” he said.<\/p>\n
“(The Elmore Events Centre team) was just blown away with what we could actually do and they were just so pumped about the sport.”<\/p>\n
New track under construction<\/p>\n
The custom built track at the Elmore Field Days site, north of Bendigo, will be about the size of two football fields.<\/p>\n
Construction has begun and it will be ready for an Australian series event in November next year.<\/p>\n
Mr Roylance said jet boat tracks have narrow channels filled with shallow water, surrounded by grass.<\/p>\n
“There’s probably six to nine different islands and the race would generally go for around 45 seconds, with one boat on the track,” Mr Roylance said.<\/p>\n
“We send these little boats out there, they’re about four-metres long \u2026 there are 35 or so intersections you have to do in that time.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An aerial view of the jet boat track at Tweed Heads, NSW. (Supplied: Justin Roylance)<\/p>\n
With a driver and a navigator in the boat, Mr Roylance said the race is adrenaline-fuelled, as the boat weaves around the track reaching 140 kilometres per hour.<\/p>\n
“They’ll accelerate from zero to that top speed in under two seconds \u2026 we’ll pull somewhere between 5 and 7 G’s going around some of these corners,” he said.Keeping the Elmore Field Days viable<\/p>\n
The Elmore Field Days has evolved from a single three-day agricultural event on borrowed land, to a year-round events facility.<\/p>\n
Executive manager Derek Shotton is thrilled about adding the jet boats.<\/p>\n
“It’s tremendous. It helps us reinforce our drive into motor sports,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got the tractor pull, we’ve got the racing lawn mowers and now we’ve got the jet boats.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Derek Shotton says the Elmore Field Days site has expanded to include a range of events. (ABC Rural: Warwick Long)<\/p>\n
Mr Shotton said they made a decision in the early 2000s to grow the field days site into a broader events centre.<\/p>\n
“We could see the days of big numbers of [agriculture] degenerating and reducing just purely because of the way everyone’s scaling up,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We wanted to make sure our community kept benefiting from what we’ve built here over the years.”<\/p>\n
With a world series V8 superboat event on the cards for Elmore as well, Mr Roylance is looking forward to racing there.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got a Victorian built boat with the Victorian built engine in it,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Our boat is called the Outlaw and we’re current Australian champion in our class \u2026 and we can’t wait to come down to Elmore and give it a go.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 62 years it has been the place for farmers to buy a new tractor, but Elmore in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,110963,127181,127182,127177,127176,127178,127180,822,2185,127175,85,127179],"class_list":["post-204565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boats","tag-derek-shotton","tag-elmore-events-centre","tag-elmore-field-days","tag-field-days","tag-jet-boats","tag-justin-roylance","tag-racing","tag-rural","tag-speed-boats","tag-sports","tag-v8-superboats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}