No Trophy from a Home Race 😮💨
G’day guys,
We had a pretty tough weekend here at Queensland Raceway, and I’m leaving my home race without a trophy.
The bright spot was qualifying, with some good starting positions for the weekend, even if a mistake in Q2 for Saturday’s second race was not ideal on my part. The day got worse from there. I don’t know what black cat I ran over for a brake problem to happen on the start line, though I’m glad it happened there rather than during racing, maybe I only ran over the black cat’s tail. But it was out to get me.
We had pretty good pace in the second race, though. We decided to go for four tyres at the stop, and we moved up two positions on where we started, so I was looking forward to a big day on Sunday.
Quali was pretty good again, I ended up sixth, which I was pretty happy with but then in the shootout I just really struggled to get one lap out of the car, and I was pretty disappointed with ninth. We’d tuned the car up for one lap but ended up giving up some of our strengths and finding some of our weaknesses. But overall we didn’t really nail it.
The race was going okay from there. I moved forward a couple of places, and I was up to seventh or sixth at some stage. Then there was all this weird strategy stuff - I’m not too sure what exactly happened, but some people really lucked into some positions - and at the end I had what was probably one of the roughest arm-wrestle races I’ve ever had with anyone.
I raced with Andre (Heimgartner) quite hard and Anton (de Pasquale) too and got myself a five-second penalty. But we were fast enough at the end to recover back to sixth in the classification, so overall I’m reasonably happy.
Off the track, I don’t think I’ve seen so many people at QR. I feel like I’m back in time at an old Queensland 500 here or something. It’s really, really cool. Especially with weather on the radar, you don’t expect to see so many people coming out. It’s unreal. I feel like this is Bathurst-spec busy. I don’t know how many people are here, but it’s pretty impressive.
Enduros are up next. We’ll bounce back at The Bend.
Cheers,
Chaz