Day One of the Perth SuperSprint has got off to a mixed start for Red Bull Racing Australia as the two practice sessions yielded second and 16th places for Craig, and results of 10th and 14th for Jamie.
“We made good progress today,” Lowndesy said. “Practice One was obviously very good. Being in second position at the end of it was encouraging as the car was working well. We tried a combination of the soft and the hard tyres and tried the same again for second practice.
“We matched our hard tyre pace, but didn’t quite match the soft tyre pace. There’s something we can work on there, but all in all the car’s balance is really nice.
“I know we’re a little bit further down the time sheet, but I’m actually pretty happy with what we’ve achieved. We’re just trying to search for that balanced car and I think we’ve got it.”
After the five week break in which much work was done on the Red Bull Holdens to improve on the weak spots glimpsed throughout the opening couple of round of the season, Jamie admits that it’s hard to tell where exactly the car is in the pecking order.
“It was good to get some laps today after five weeks off,” he said. “We got through our test plan and to be honest we’re not sure where we’re at. We don’t know if we’re good, bad or otherwise at the moment. It’s very difficult to read, so we’re not exactly sure where we’re at.
“Mechanically everything’s fine on the car and it’s good to do some laps. We did quite a few laps on the soft tyre because that’s what Sunday’s race is all about and they degraded really fast, so we’ve got some work to do with that and we’ve got some work to do for qualifying, but that’s what it’s all about.”
Tomorrow’s practice session kicks the day off at 9:15am local time, with two qualifying sessions and two 60km races to follow. Check out your local TV schedule here.
