The crew on André Heimgartner’s Plus Fitness Racing Nissan Supercar have taken this weekend’s Parc Ferme rule trial in their stride delivering a car with fantastic pace for today’s race. André started today’s race from fifteenth on the grid but quickly found himself inside the top ten.
A great battle with Tim Slade unfolded in the closing laps of the race and André took a dive for position but unfortunately a brake issue meant the car couldn’t be stopped for the corner and Andre left the track. After a great recovery he finished a strong twelfth.
Rick Kelly had a tough qualifying in the Castrol Racing Supercar but was able to pick up five spots during this afternoon’s race. Rick had a fantastic start to today’s race, picking up three places on the opening lap. From there he was able to move forward to finish sixteenth.
Simona De Silvestro struggled during today’s race with a car that wasn’t to her liking. The #78 Team Harvey Norman car usually has solid race pace but the team tried something different with the car today and it didn’t pay off.
Garry Jacobson and the crew on car #3 struggled with braking performance in the Rabble.club Racing car. An early brake lock-up caused a flat spot on the tyre which put Garry into the pits early. A similar incident occurred during the second stint however the resulting flat spot wasn’t nearly as bad.
Kelly Racing Team quotes
André Heimgartner, #7 Plus Fitness Racing
« Little bit of a disappointing way to finish the race unfortunately, just didn’t tap the brake once and the pedal went all the way to the floor when I was trying to brake into the last corner so went off the track and finished thirteenth when we should have finished ninth. »
« We had good car speed, we were able to pick up a good five spots from where we qualified so we’ll take some positives from that. The race tomorrow should be good, hopefully we can qualify a bit better and move forward from there. »
Rick Kelly, #15 Castrol Racing
« Our day was largely hindered by our qualifying, we didn’t get a clean lap on our second run and that put us in a really poor starting position so we got three spots off the start and a couple with other people’s incidents.
« Ipswich is the sort of track where if you don’t qualify well it’s hard to move forward so we will definitely be looking at how we can improve for qualifying tomorrow so that we don’t have to start on the back foot going forward for the race. »
Simona De Silvestro, #78 Team Harvey Norman
« We had an ok start to today’s race but then at the last corner of the first lap we kind of got stuck in a bit of traffic and lost a few spots there. Then we just struggled with understeer in the car and even playing with the rollbar settings in the car I couldn’t get it to where I wanted. »
« Usually our race pace is strong and today it wasn’t so we definitely need to look at that and improve the car for tomorrow »
Garry Jacobson, #3 Rabble.club Racing
« We had to pit really early because I had a big front lock up which was strange because I didn’t really do anything different to trigger that, so that forced us to pit early and unfortunately a similar thing happened on the second set of tyres just not quite as bad. »
« We seemed to be lacking braking performance overall so if we can fix that for tomorrow and make it a bit more consistent we’ll be in a better position tomorrow. »
Press release Kelly Racing
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