Macauley Jones Supercars Round-Up

10 Jun, 2019

Five rounds have passed in what has been my debut season in the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship.

It has been a roller coaster ride already with what was the biggest accident in my career to date caused by a sudden brake failure. The effort to rebuild the car overnight by the team was massive. Mechanics dove in first to pull apart all the damage with the rear end structure, carbon panels and fuel tank so that the fabricators could step in. They used grinders, slide hammers, welders and an oxygen torch to straighten, cut and replace five of the structural chassis rails. Once the two fabricators had finished it was time again for mechanics to start fitting the spare parts and reset the car up to run again. With a 4am finish, it meant we would be on the grid for the Sunday race with the mechanics going back to get two 2 hours of sleep before returning to go racing again. It was definitely a shock and took me a few days to recover mentally and physically. With hitting the track on Sunday morning I didn’t hesitate at all to get back into the hustle of driving around the Adelaide street circuit and try to salvage some points from the weekend.

Although it meant the team and I had to press the reset button, build a new car post-event to be ready for the next round at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne just 2 weeks later, we tried to put it to the back of mind and move forward to the next race and focus on how we could improve after the set back.

One of the biggest differences from Super 2 into the main game series has been the big intensity jump. With often only one second splitting the entire field, it became evident to me that I needed to make all the little 1 percenters matter. Areas I’ve been working on have been adapting to the car and track conditions quicker, like those drivers at the top of their game can do. They just seem to know what they want out of the car very quickly whereas I’m learning the tracks, having longer races and working to minimize on any mistakes I make and to try to improve in all areas.

My focus at this point in the season is to keep producing incremental steps to making a faster car with my engineer Julian Stannard and minimising those mistakes behind the wheel. I have shown consistent steps forward with my best result of 16th at the most recent round at Winton and I’m looking forward to heading up to Darwin and fighting it out in the heat.

I hope you have all enjoyed watching and cheering for the #21 Team CoolDrive racing car so far this season. Exciting racing ahead!

Thanks,
Macca