Following a challenging day at The Bend Motorsport Park, Nulon Racing is hopeful work overnight will allow it to pull off a turnaround in form across Sunday’s two final races of the event’s SuperSprint format.
It was a busy day at the Tailem Bend venue today, featuring two practice sessions, qualifying in the always high-pressure three-phase knock-out format, and a 20-lap race to close out the afternoon.
In the #31 Nulon Racing Camaro, Jimmy Golding was P19 and P16 in practice before qualifying P15 and bringing home P14 for the race – an equal-best finishing result at this venue for the Victorian. He also held the fastest lap of the field for several laps early in the race proceedings.
In the #23 Nulon Racing Camaro, Tim Slade was P14 in both practice sessions, P18 in qualifying and finished the race in P16 after narrowly avoiding the lap one, turn one carnage of other competitors, which saw the race under safety car control for four laps.
When the race resumed on lap five, Golding was P12 while Slade was P17. With the CPS window opening immediately after the restart, Slade pitted for rear tyres immediately while Golding followed on the next lap, also for rear tyres only.
From that point on, both racers did their best to hold position amongst a tight field while managing tyre degradation in the final stages.
“It was a busy first day at The Bend with a couple of practices, qualifying and a race, and it was pretty average unfortunately – we need to make it better for tomorrow. I need more grip in the front and the rear, so hopefully we can do something about that ahead of tomorrow,” Slade said.
“We struggled a bit today. It wasn’t horrendous, but it certainly wasn’t great. We were consistently mid-field. In the race for me, I plucked off a few at the start, lost a couple at the end, and there were parts of the race where we were strong, so at least we have some positives we can take into tomorrow,” Golding said.
The Nulon Racing Engineering team echoed their drivers’ sentiments as they got ready for a busy night of analysis, changes and preparation ahead of tomorrow’s proceedings.
“It was a bit of a mediocre race for us – after the incident at the start we made some good progress, but unfortunately a little bit of tyre degradation hurt us. We made what progress we could, with Jimmy coming home one spot up and Tim two spots up, but obviously we want to be doing better than that and we will be doing a lot of work overnight to try and turn it around for tomorrow,” Nulon Racing Chief Engineer and Engineer for the #31, Geoff Slater, said.
“It is obviously disappointing (to not advance further), but it was such a short race, so there is not much you can do with strategy. We had pace similar to the cars around us, and at a track like this is hard to overtake, so that is all we had today. Hopefully tomorrow with the two qualifying sessions, we can start further up for the two races,” #23 Nulon Racing Camaro Engineer, Romy Mayer, said.
Sunday at The Bend will feature back-to-back 15 minute qualifying sessions for races 21 and 22 from 9.45am followed by races 21 (12.50pm) and 22 (3.50pm). For event information, visit www.supercars.com.au
For more information on 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
