Finals Optimism After Double Podium in Townsville!

Hey guys,

First of all, it’s always so special getting to Townsville. I really love this event, being a Queenslander, and it’s just so cool to have a street track and to see so many fans come out of this too.

I always have a reasonably good run up here, and I do love this place, though I can never stand on the top step! But I seem to always rack up a couple of podiums.

I had high hopes on Friday, but unfortunately we rolled out reasonably weak, and we really chased our tails. We showed glimpses of speed but didn’t really put it together at all on Friday. But we hung on and somehow got a result of P6, which we were pretty stoked about. But we knew the rest of the weekend was going to be a pretty hard task.

On Saturday we changed the car a fair bit, but we still just didn’t really find out feet in qualifying, and we ended up P17. It really pushed the guys in the team to be really super aggressive with the car and to try something that we haven’t tried for quite some time, and then in the race it just lit up. I still can’t quite believe it.

Saturday was a really awesome race car, and we ended up getting from 17th all the way up to second. The car was just really, really superior. It was awesome.

On Sunday I tried to refine it a little bit. I qualified much better but in the top-10 shootout just didn’t quite have the grip that we needed for whatever reason. We ended up eighth but still very optimistic we could get a good result with our race car. We stuck to our guns and raced hard, and with a little bit of strategy here and there we were able to get ourselves back into third.

We didn’t quite have enough for the front two Red Bull guys — I think we matched them on pace, but we just definitely had a bit more of a misbalance on the day with the car which was a bit harder to drive around.

I’m happy to have a good, solid result at Townsivlle because the finals at the back part of the year are at very similar tracks, so you need strengths like you have here. This could really come into our favour, but we’ll see how we go.

See you at QR!

Chaz