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PREMIAIR NULON RACING KEEPS ITS COOL AMIDST TERRIBLE SANDOWN CONDITIONS
14th fastest 1:13.4496
16th fastest 1:13.5402
Following a bitterly cold and wet Saturday at Sandown International Raceway, which was punctuated by a pre-qualifying hail storm, PremiAir Nulon Racing is concentrating on what needs to be done for tomorrow’s Sandown 500, which will hopefully be held in much more pleasant racing conditions for which they are well-prepared.
Jimmy Golding will start the #31 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro from P14 on the grid while Tim Slade will line-up P16 in the #23 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro for the 161-lap race they will share with co-drivers David Russell and Cameron McLeod respectively.
The day opened with practice four and five, with both 40-minute sessions open to all drivers.
In practice four, all four drivers delivered a solid session in heavy rain, with Tim Slade and Cameron McLeod in the #23 (P18) and Jimmy Golding and David Russell in the #31 (P16).
Practice five saw a drying line in the final moments with a number of teams including PremiAir Nulon Racing putting on slicks for the closing laps, before the session was red flagged with one minute remaining on the clock for a stuck Will Davison. Even with the early finish, the team was pleased to see the #31 and #23 secure P6 and P8 respectively for this outing.
The wet weather conditions weren’t done for the day however, and seven minutes before qualifying began, hail fell on the circuit. Thankfully, it quickly cleared to allow the 20-minute session to begin at its scheduled time of 2.15pm, amidst ambient temperatures of eight degrees while the track was registering at 11 degrees.
And the drama didn’t end there, with a red flag soon bringing things to a holt and effectively splitting qualifying in half while Golding was P6. Slade meanwhile had been forced to abort his push lap when the red flags flew.
After a 12 minute delay to retrieve the damaged car of Aaron Love, the session was restarted with 11 minutes on the clock, leaving all teams with a mad dash to get up to temp and lay down a competitive time in what were still extremely precarious conditions.
Now the team looks ahead to Sunday’s race start at 2.05pm, which will be preceded by a 20 minute warm-up at 9.55am. With the majority of their work to date having focused on race car set-up, including a heavy concentration on this during the dry conditions yesterday which are expected to return tomorrow, the team feels it has a solid footing from which to launch into the 60th anniversary race.
In the Super2 ranks, McLeod qualified the #92 RM Racing PremiAir Racing Holden Commodore ZB in P14 for this afternoon’s Race 8 of the season. He crossed the line in P10 but was reclassified to P21 after a 15-second penalty was imposed. Alongside his Sandown 500 duties, McLeod will roll out for one more qualifying session and another race tomorrow.
QUOTEBOARD: SANDOWN 500 – SATURDAY 14 SEPTEMBER, 2024
Ludo Lacroix – PremiAir Nulon Racing Competition Director
“We had some good and some bad today. Tim hasn’t been very lucky between P4 and P5, it has been a wet day so we have been running mainly on wet tyres, the good thing is we did all our dry work yesterday and we looked after the race car with no quali set-up, so we may have a good idea of what we need to do for tomorrow. In saying that we could have done a very good job for quali on dry, but it would have been useless as we were on wets today. We didn’t start very well with Tim, which meant we were on the back foot always, sometimes we scored some good laps but we knew we didn’t have the best of it. In quali with Tim, we started quali and had a little off on the first lap which put us again on the back foot a bit. In all fairness we probably didn’t plan enough ahead enough on the wet sessions, saying okay we need to run an extra couple of laps in case we need to run all the time, so we were again on the back foot for the second part of the session and couldn’t do as many laps as we could have, would it have changed, I am not sure. Tim executed a couple of corners very well overall on that last lap he did and he is missing the top ten by two tenths so it is not like he is miles away; he is two tenths off where it needed to be and when we compare to our friends at T8, he is actually faster in some places, so it is not like his car was necessarily a bad car, we just didn’t exhibit a very good morning to prepare him to be able to go qualifying. So basically, we lost qualifying. I think the car was capable of going in the top ten but because we didn’t do the job of pre-empting that and giving him as many chances as possible, he couldn’t execute because it is not that simple to execute that lap with this weather and changing weather, so that is where Tim is. On Jimmy, he had a good morning, he was strong in practice four, he was strong in practice five, he was in the top ten in the first part of the session he was sixth before the red flag so he was strong. We came in again and on that car we probably should have put in a bit more fuel to cover a couple of more laps and then when he went out on that second set of tyres he never found that grip level that he needed, he did improve a little bit but not enough to get to the top ten. On the wet track, we didn’t do a very good job in quali and as a group we were a little bit behind from the morning and we needed to be better and execute better. That is an honest assessment of where we are. Hopefully we can do a better job tomorrow – have a clean warm-up and then go into racing with a known set up that we believe can look after tyres. It will be warm with a car that has a bit of speed and definitely look after its tyres.”
Tim Slade – #23 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro
“We kind of struggled when the track was fully wet, the only time we became a little bit competitive was when the track started to get a bit of a dry line. The actual balance of the car didn’t feel horrendous, it just felt like we lacked a bit of overall grip. The more laps we did and the more temp we got into the tyres, the more competitive we were, but still obviously a little bit off. Tomorrow looks like it is going to be dry so we just have to go back to the work that we did with the race car in practice yesterday and I am glad that we did focus on the race car so much yesterday so that we have a bit of a base that we know heading into the race tomorrow. I think we are probably 90 percent sure on race set-up based on the last session yesterday. Camy (McLeod) did a few laps today in the wet too and he did a good job like he has in the dry, so hopefully everything is kind to us tomorrow and we can have a good clean race and a bit of speed and get a good result.”
Jimmy Golding – #31 PremiAir Nulon Racing Camaro
“It was a pretty good run in practice in wet conditions; I felt pretty comfortable and had good pace. Obviously it was about just being on the forefront of what the track conditions were and how you needed the car for that. I think we did a pretty good job all the way to the last run and where we put that last set of tyres on and it really just didn’t hook up how the car had felt on the previous set and how it had felt in practice, so we were a bit surprised with that. But we are looking forward tomorrow. It is going to be dry so it (today) is not going to matter too much for the race but it is also disappointing to know we had the car and everything to do it in the wet but for whatever reason it didn’t happen at the end. It is a long race tomorrow and we have done as much as we can on the race car up to this point – we have spent the whole time working on the race car – so I am looing forward to jumping into the race and seeing how many cars we can pass.”
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/
