André Heimgartner has finished strong in this afternoon’s 200km race in around the Townsville street circuit claiming twelth spot in the final lap of the race. The #7 Plus Fitness crew had a great qualifying with André finishing comfortably inside the top ten in P8, however the race didn’t quite go to plan.
The start of the race was action-packed and André was able to pick up a few spots to move up to P6 early on. Unfortunately contact from behind just a few laps in sent André’s car off line which caused him to fall back to ninth place. The whack also caused significant damage to the rear bumper which had to be removed in the pitstop, adding unnecessary time to the stop.
Fortunately André’s Plus Fitness Racing entry had great speed throughout the race and on the final lap the young Kiwi was able to push past James Courtney and come home in twelfth.
It wasn’t Rick Kelly’s day in the #100 Castrol Racing car with understeer holding him back in qualifying. The team was able to provide a more driveable package for the race, but a spin caused by contact from Waters put Rick on the back foot going forward.
Simona De Silvestro had a good start to the race in the #78 Team Harvey Norman car, however tyre degradation played a big part in her day and unfortunately the grip wasn’t there to push higher up the standings.
Garry Jacobson also started strong in the #3 Rabble.club Racing car but suffered similar tyre drop off.
Kelly Racing Team quotes
André Heimgartner, #7 Plus Fitness Racing : « We had a good start but the contact really put us on the back foot so it’s pretty annoying, it’s another race that has been ruined by nothing that I could do so it’s getting a bit old. But on the positive side we had the speed once again to be inside the top ten so I just have to go searching for my lucky socks and hopefully find them for tomorrow. » Towards the end we were quite strong and got in front of Courtney on the last lap so that was good and in some ways it’s fun having a few passes towards the end but we’d really rather be in a good position rather than scrapping for places on the last lap. »
Rick Kelly, #100 Castrol Racing : « The car and the result wasn’t so bad yesterday so I think we loured ourselves into a false sense of security today. In practice and qualifying today it just didn’t perform the same with a similar setup so that’s what hurt us. » We were in a position where we probably needed to change the car more for qualifying and didn’t manage to get it right so we qualified back and made big changes for the race and I think those changes helped a little bit but we need to improve more for tomorrow. » Getting turned around by Waters hurts your results a little bit too because it drops your position back into traffic and it also hurts your tyres so there’s no hard feelings on that but it hurt us a little bit. »
Simona De Silvestro, #78 Team Harvey Norman : « I think qualifying was ok but it was a difficult race for us, we need to work on improving the race pace and we really struggled with the tyres today which is something a bit new, we haven’t had issues with tyre degradation at the last few tracks so we need to analyse that and find out why and hopefully have a better race car tomorrow. » Each stint it was quite difficult to manage the tyres and that’s an area where I feel I’ve improved a lot this year but today was just really hard. »
Garry Jacobson, #3 Rabble.club Racing : « We had a good start to today’s race, we actually picked up quite a few positions early on but half way through the second stint the tyres just really started to drop off and that held me up and we started to drop back. » We tried a few small things with the car to try and give it a bit better tyre life for the final stint but it wasn’t really helping too much so we need to look at it tonight and see if we can improve for tomorrow. »
Press release Kelly Racing
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