Tim Slade's Recap of Sandown SuperSprint

26 Mar, 2021

Round 2 was a bit of a messy weekend for us at Sandown. The guys did an incredible job building up the spare chassis, a huge amount of hours went into it and everything was done to perfection.

The weekend got off to a good start in practice 1 with P3 but unfortunately, we didn’t manage to stay up there throughout the rest of the weekend.

We made a mistake with a setup change that was adjusted the wrong way to what it should have been before qualifying and that hampered our result in that session and also the first race. We didn’t work this out until the following morning but it was a relief to find as nothing really seemed to make sense at the time!

Apart from the second half of the first race on Sunday, the rest of the day was wet. We qualified poorly in both sessions but made the most of pitting early to change from wets to slicks in race 2 and finished up P9.

Conditions in the last race were pretty horrendous and the visibility down the straights in the opening few laps was next to nothing which was fun…! We really struggled for grip from the wet tyre until we pitted for another set just over halfway through the race. The pressures in that second set were different and we went from basically being the slowest car to the second fastest car on track for the last 15 odd laps. Sounds crazy but we were a whole 3 seconds per lap faster! We lost too much ground at the start though so could only manage to get back up to P17.

The work didn’t stop post-race Sunday arvo as we had to prepare the car for our sponsor ride day the following day. This included an engine change to keep the miles off our race engine and finish the miles on another engine that will now be due for a freshen-up post-ride day. We had a really good day and took around 60 people for a fun-filled ride around Sandown!

Overall not a fantastic weekend results-wise, but I’m still super happy and pumped with what we have, the potential is still well and truly there and we will learn from our mistakes. We have a bit over 2 weeks to prepare the car before it goes on the boat to Tasmania for round 3 at Symmons Plains. So hopefully the guys can finally get a bit of proper sleep now that they don’t have to build a race team or a race car! Real excited for the next one, can’t wait to nail some good results, it’ll happen.

Cheers,

Sladey