Kelly Racing put its best foot forward as the first race for the Supercars Championship was held at the Melbourne 400, Albert Park, this evening.
Plus Fitness Racing’s Andre Heimgartner was the best of the Kelly Racing finishers, coming home 15th. Castrol Racing’s Rick Kelly ran as high as 14th before he dropped to 16th on the final lap of the 25-lap opening bout. Kelly’s race was further hampered after the stewards imposed post-race penalty for a pit lane infringement. Team Harvey Norman driver Simona De Silvestro battled through tyre degradation to finish 19th, while RABBLE.Club racer Garry Jacobson made up three spots off the start before his race was compromised by a second lap incident with Todd Hazelwood. He crossed the line in 22nd. Races 4 and 5 will be held tomorrow (12:50pm and 6:30pm), running over 13 laps and 25 laps respectively, before Race 6 will be held on Sunday ahead of the 2019 Rolex Formula One Australian Grand Prix.
QUOTES
Andre Heimgartner #7 Plus Fitness « It was a frustrating day overall, we just didn’t have the car speed to be able to fight during that race. We’ll need to tune the car up overnight to give us some better tyre life over the duration. We’ll get back out there tomorrow and stay out of trouble to collect some important championship points. »
Rick Kelly #15 Castrol Racing « We weren’t too excited after our qualifying sessions yesterday so the team decided to have a big swing at the set-up for the remaining qualifying which hurt us this morning, and a bigger swing for this afternoon’s race which hurt us again. We have a lack of pace at the moment but we’re throwing big things at the car to try and understand it and that has brought some inconsistency as a result. »
Simona De Silvestro #78 Team Harvey Norman « We started alright but throughout the race we fell backwards and we can’t seem to pull up to anyone on track. The tyre degradation was pretty big so we’ve got a bit of work to do overnight and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow. »
Garry Jacobson #3 RABBLE.Club « We sustained a bit of damage after an incident on Lap 2. (Todd) Hazelwood locked a front tyre and ran into me, but that’s racing. We had a steering rack issue from then on, so we’ll have to check the car overnight and see what went wrong there. We were able to jump three spots at the start of the race, but after the contact we just had to deal with that, finish the race and move on to tomorrow. »
Press release Kelly Racing
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