CONSISTENT RESULT IN WILD SANDOWN WEEKEND 😅
Hey everyone,
The start of the Enduro Season is officially underway 💪 As a driver, and I’m sure as a fan too, this is the best part of the year, as our biggest events fire up as well as a different style of racing, needless to say it’s my favourite time.
Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne…typical bloody weather down this way 😅 That’s about the only thing you can bank on down here, is that you’ll get all four seasons in one day, which is exactly what we had for the event. From rain, hail, and sunshine, we had it all, which made it a super challenging weekend.
It’s challenging because you don’t know what conditions you’re setting the car up for - an example being during Saturday’s opening session, where we slid around the track on wets in practice, with the expectation that it’d clear up for Quali.
Turns out the weatherman must’ve been having a stab in the dark, because it didn’t clear up for Quali, meaning our wet car was what we were running 😂 Anyway, it’s the same for all of us in pitlane, and fortunately, the team did a great job in the wet trim, and we made it into the shootout with a P2 time in qualifying.
There’s no doubt it’s crunch time in the championship now, so every session is important to maximise with only a handful of races left. We had a challenging track again for the shootout, not knowing what to expect, and I struggled to get my tyres up to temperature for my lap, managing the sixth fastest time.
Not a bad result all things considered, as 161 laps is a lot of racing and with strategy, co-drivers, and so on, really anything can happen. As long as you’re somewhere near the front, and can avoid the chaos, then you’re off to a good start in these races.
Come race time, I got off to a pretty good start and was sitting inside the top five after climbing a couple of places. We had a really topsy-turvy race, I feel like everyone did with the amount of Safety Cars and interruptions, that it was difficult to know where we were at times 😅
That is the nature of endurance racing though, plus Leeroy doing his stints in the car, a couple of 360’s to boot, and you kind of guess where you might wind up once the order is corrected. I put my foot to the floor in my stints, had a bit of catching up to do, and that ultimately got us into P7 to finish the weekend.
Not really our weekend in Sandown, I didn’t have the feeling that I was chasing across the sessions and unfortunately we dropped some points in the championship. They always say championships are won on your challenging days though, and seventh is certainly damage limitation.
Time to take the fight to the Mountain in a month!
Chaz 🤙