Friday has been a tough day at the office for Red Bull Racing Australia, but Lowndesy has claimed his spot in tomorrow’s Top Ten Shootout.
Scraping in on his last lap of the 40 minute session, Lowndesy overcame a lack of pace to steer the No.888 Commodore to ninth, then to be shifted down one spot to tenth, but overall he was happy with the feel of the car.
“It was the toughest top 10 result I’ve ever had to drive for,” he reflected afterwards. “We’re still searching for the right balance, the car is nice to drive but it’s not speedy to drive yet.
“Everyone else stepped up their game by half a second today and we didn’t which shows that we have to take a good look at it overnight.
“We’re confident that we can do a better job of it tomorrow, we still have some searching to do but all in all we’re happy to be where we are but we’ve still got more in us.”
There were no such saving graces on the other side of the garage though as Jamie lost the rear of his Red Bull Holden at The Cutting about 15 minutes into the session, hitting the wall and bringing out the red flag.
The driver error has ultimately left JDub and co-drive Paul Dumbrell starting from 25th on Sunday’s grid, but the championship leader is confident that they can turn this incident into a result: “We’re not going to let this affect us, we’re going to put our heads down, reset tonight and go again tomorrow.
“It was my fault, I’ve got to put my hand up. I made an error, which I shouldn’t have as a professional driver. I was a bit slow in that sector so I was trying to find a few extra tenths of a second and pushed harder and got out of rhythm and the end result was me in the wall.
“The car was miles better than it was yesterday so it’s good to know that at least we’re actually in the game for race pace now. Unfortunately we are going to start the biggest race of the year second last but at least I’m injury-free.”
Tomorrow’s final practice session kicks off at 10:20am AEDT and don’t forget to tune into the Top Ten Shootout from 5:10pm to see where Craig and Steve Richards will start the Great Race.