In The Principals Office: Townsville 500
Townsville is an awesome little circuit. It’s a tough one for engineers because it’s one of the bumpiest, and highest tyre degradation circuits that we race on, with the fast section through the parklands area of the circuit adding to the challenge.
As an event the town always gets right behind it in Townsville and I love the festival feeling. It’s also nice to drop the extra 5 layers of clothing required in Melbourne at the moment and getting back into the shorts and t-shirt.
We’ll run the Indigenous livery again, there’s a large First Nations population on North Queensland and hopefully it inspires more young people from Indigenous backgrounds to chase a career in motorsport.
I’ve been lucky to be apart of a win up there before, it’s one of those places that if you have a good car you can win the race by 30 seconds, but with a bad one you can be the complete opposite and a very long way behind the leader.
The two 250km races this weekend sees a return of the the longer race format which brings with it the element of refuelling in pit stops and the added complexity of dual compound tyres to use in the races, adding to the headaches that engineers need to wrap their heads around.
This circuit will suit the strengths of our cars, which have shown very good tyre life so far – a key factor in the longer formats.
After Darwin I couldn’t help but feel disappointed with out results because we had car speed with had a front row start for Reynolds, but we didn’t convert it into a podium result.
Behind the wheel our drivers have been doing a good job and I’m really pleased with what they’ve produced so far but they know where they need to up the ante.
With Reynolds he’s shown his speed in qualifying but I’d like to see him be more aggressive and get the elbows out on track and show it’s not by luck that he’s racing up the front of the field.
Lee is a bit the opposite, his qualifying hasn’t been ideal, which he knows, and his race craft and speed has been great all year long.
The long races this weekend may allow more time to recover from a poor qualifying but you still need car speed. I think this circuit will suit the set up direction that Lee likes to go in and we’ve identified some key areas we need to work on for Car #10 for Qualifying that we’ll push to put it into practice
As a team this season has been great to be apart of the progress we’ve shown so far in 2022, we want wins and podiums but from the inside the small improvements I can see week-to-week are starting to add up.
We’re having some fun going racing together and I more podiums and a win just around the corner.
Enjoy the racing, we’ll be pushing our hardest.
