A P8 finish for Tim Slade in the #23 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro has highlighted Saturday at the Melbourne Super Sprint for PremiAir Nulon Racing, with the result coming amidst a heavily shortened race.
Slade had started the race P8 on the grid following this morning’s back-to-back 15 minute qualifying sessions (for today’s race five and tomorrow’s race six), improving to P6 across the opening laps.
When heavy contact between two other drivers saw the field sent to the lane for the clean-up, a fast and furious four lap dash to the finish was set-up and Slade persevered through car balance issues to bring the #23 home in P8.
Golding meanwhile had started what was supposed to be a 14 lap race from P16 and kept his nose clean throughout a lot of biff and barge to work his way through the field to be P12 before the crash clean-up, with his progress through the field to that point signalling that perhaps without the pause to and shortening of the race, there could have been the potential for two top tens for the team today.
“It was a case of mixed qualifying sessions this morning for us with one decent one and then one average one, I feel we dropped a lot more time than I thought we would between the two sessions. It was only one tiny little change that we made, but it didn’t give me what I wanted and sort of took away from the other end, so that was disappointing to not have the consistency session to session,” Slade explained.
“In the race this afternoon I stayed out of trouble at the start and maintained position, and we were looking decent there for a while, but the car balance even early on wasn’t fantastic and then on the restart it was pretty bad and we struggled for speed, so we will work on that for tomorrow.”
Golding felt that more car pace is pending in his #31 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro, which is continuing to have gearbox issues with another gearbox change undertaken earlier today following yesterday’s change, which unfortunately hasn’t yet fixed the problem.
“We just kept out of trouble this afternoon, we plucked off a couple of spots, but it was more about ‘right place, right time’,” Golding said.
“There is still a lot to work on with the car pace and we will try again tomorrow.”
The PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaros will start tomorrow’s (Sunday’s) fourth and final Supercars race at the Melbourne Super Sprint from P15 (Golding) and P17 (Slade) at 10.25am. For event information and schedules, visit www.supercars.com.au
For more information on PremiAir Nulon Racing, please visit www.premiairracing.com or follow the team on its social media platforms at www.facebook.com/PremiAirRacing/, www.instagram.com/premiair_racing/, www.linkedin.com/company/premiairracing/ and www.twitter.com/premiairracing
