Jayden “Juice” Ojeda is putting in the extra work ahead of the Darwin Triple Crown, with race starts firmly in his sights as a key priority for the next phase of his Supercars rookie season.
Ojeda’s raw pace has been on show throughout 2026 — nowhere more so than at the Tasmania Super440, where he qualified an impressive third for the Sunday feature race. But a sluggish getaway dropped him to 10th by the end of Lap 1, highlighting an area the PremiAir Racing driver is determined to address before the team arrives in Darwin.
The challenge stems from Ojeda’s background in GT3 racing, which predominantly features rolling starts rather than the standing getaways required in Supercars.
“I won’t say I’ve got my head around it, that’s for sure,” Ojeda said. “It’s obviously a massive area of focus, so we’re putting some extra attention into it which is needed.
“Ultimately just coming from doing GT3 cars for so many years and not having to do standing starts, you just lose that feeling that you develop over years and years in junior categories with standing starts of loading the clutch and getting the car off the line.”
Ojeda said the process is about fast-tracking something that normally takes years to develop through junior motorsport categories.
“It’s probably just trying to get some of that feeling back and fast-track that process a bit,” he said. “I’m confident that it will come of course, but it’s just an area that we need to put some attention into before Darwin.”
The other key area of focus for Ojeda is mastering the fine art of Supercar set-up — a discipline he describes as far more demanding than the GT3 environment he has spent much of his career in.
“A GT car you can just sort of get it within the window and then once it’s in that window there’s not too much tuning session by session,” he explained. “But with a Supercar, the window is so small and it’s so sensitive to a lot of external factors that you’re just always chasing that window.”
Ojeda arrives in Darwin with prior Supercars experience at Hidden Valley, having raced there as a wildcard in 2022. He’ll be looking to keep his 2026 form trending in the right direction when the Darwin Triple Crown gets underway on June 19–21.
Fuelled by Ambition.
Source: V8 Sleuth — Ojeda working overtime on fixing sluggish starts