The Winton SuperSprint has got off to a familiar start for the Red Bull Holdens, as today’s two practice sessions yielded unsatisfactory results, but the team is confident of a form turnaround.
Lowndes, who finished 11th and 10th respectively across the two hours of practice, is positive that the crew has a solid foundation to improve upon: “It didn’t go too bad today. I think we had good balance on our used tyres. When we put our new tyres on it sort of imbalanced the car a little bit.
“We’re struggling with a lack of front tyre grip, which is what you need around here for a good lap time, so we’ve got something to work at. I think the beauty about today is that we know where we are now in relation to everyone else in car speed with the tyre life that we’ve got.
“I’m not too disappointed, the car was flowing really well and Grant and I have made a number of changes. We’ll sit down tonight and prepare for tomorrow, but I’m still confident that we can make a decent car out of what we’ve done.”
While Craig’s results were consistent, Jamie had a strong start out of the box with a second place finish in the opening session, but struggled to 20th on the set of green hard tyres in the second.
“Today didn’t go very well at all,” he said. “We just have no pace, which has continued on from Perth.
“We seemed to be on track during the session, then we put our set of green tyres on and we were almost last, so I don’t know. It’s not really making sense at the moment, so we’ll keep doing what we do and working hard to fix it, but if you don’t have any pace, you can’t do anything.
“We’ve come here with a fresh sheet of paper and we didn’t really look at last year’s results because they were so bad. But if that’s our highlight, then we’re in for a tough weekend and we need to do something – we just need to work out what it is.”
Tomorrow’s action kicks off with practice at 9:35am AEST, followed by two qualifying sessions and two 60km races. Click here to check the TV schedules.
