Day one of the Darwin Triple Crown at Hidden Valley Raceway has seen PremiAir Racing get off to a somewhat slow but steady start across two practice sessions, with plenty of learnings made which will serve the team well tonight as they prepare for Saturday’s twin races.
Both PremiAir Racing Camaros – sporting their special Indigenous round liveries designed by Widjabul artist Sheldon ‘SJ’ Harrington for former Wallabies stars at the helm of Moonyah Workforce, Anthony and Saia Fainga’a – had a comprehensive preparation program to work through across the two 30-minute practice sessions held today.
While Jimmy Golding in the #31 PremiAir Racing Camaro was unable to set a flyer in either session (P20 and P23), thwarted by traffic and a brief excursion off-track at the most inopportune times, Richie Stanaway in the #62 PremiAir Racing entry was able to log the sixth quickest time in P1. The Kiwi also spent some time in the top quarter of the timing totem in P2, before eventually crossing the line P21.
While on the face of it these results may be nothing to spectacular to write home about, the team has plenty to work with now ahead of Saturday’s twin qualifying and races thanks to lots of valuable data banked and lessons learnt across the cumulative hour of running today, and both drivers report they are feeling positive.
This weekend marks some role changes in the PremiAir Racing garage for the #62. So far this season, it has been engineered by PremiAir Racing Competition Director, Ludo Lacroix, as part of a transition program for the new driver into the team. Lacroix has now handed the reins to Andrew Gilliam – who engineered Slade’s entry in the latter half of the 2024 season. The change – brought forward by one round from what was originally planned – allows Lacroix to focus on his duties as competition director, including overseeing strategy for both Stanaway and Golding.
Now, the team turns their focus to rolling out a qualifying car, with qualifying for races 17 and 18 to be held back-to-back utilising the two-part format at 8.35am and 9.25am, before the two 42-lap races themselves kick off at 11.45am and 3.10pm respectively (all times local). For full event information, visit www.supercars.com
QUOTEBOARD: DARWIN TRIPLE CROWN – Friday 20 June, 2025
Ludo Lacroix – Competition Director, PremiAir Racing
“It was a difficult day at the race track really, with not a lot to show. I am not too sure where we are in terms of performance. Jimmy seems confident, but at the end of the day you need to do laps and you need to perform, so I am not sure we are there. Richie showed a little bit of pace early on but I am not too sure where we are there at this stage, it is not settled down yet. There is a fair bit of work to do tonight to try and find a happy medium between oversteer and understeer and the performance of the car.”
Richie Stanaway – #62 PremiAir Racing Camaro
“It was a bit of an up and down day for us. I feel like we have been experimenting a lot with some of the stuff we learnt in Perth. We made a lot of changes and didn’t have long between the two sessions to dig too deep into it; but I think we have a pretty clear idea of where we need to head tomorrow, which is the whole point of practice really. We didn’t end up too flash at the end of practice two but we learnt a lot out of the session so we will put it all together and see how we end up tomorrow.”
Jimmy Golding – #31 PremiAir Racing Camaro
“We had a set plan for what we were going to do which most of it went according to plan, there were a couple of small issues which probably saw us miss out on a couple of laps here and there, but that wasn’t really detrimental to the day. It just probably wasn’t the most comfortable early on and we probably needed to get it a bit more tuned into the track and get a bit more laps under the belt. So, heading into P2 we made a change to something we went the wrong way with in practice one so that was a lot better for practice two. At the end there, we went for the green tyre run and I was stuck between cars on a flying lap letting them past and then also the car in front of me warming its tyres up going slow, so I had to start my lap basically right up the back of someone else which is never ideal. So that is not really a true indication of where we are, I think the car feels pretty good from my side of things. I don’t really know where we stand but at the same time I am pretty happy with the feeling I am getting from the car.”
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