Keep up-to-date with how the team is Making it Super at the 2023 Bathurst 1000.
Thursday 05/10
Practice 1 – 10th (2:06.7993)
Practice 2 (co-drivers only) – Fifth (2:06.7650)
Craig Lowndes
“The track is a bit green at the moment I think it’ll improve when a bit more rubber gets put down. The car was good when we rolled it out this morning which is always a good sign. We made a few changes after my stint this morning for the second practice session this afternoon which seemed to have a positive effect. All in all, it was a great day. We’ve got a few more things we’d like to try but all in all, it was a great day. In practice one we had a good result and landed within the top ten, I was still getting used to the soft tyre and the lack of aero in these cars, but the new balance we’re going to encounter as we go across the top of the mountain. For me, I keep saying it reminds me of the early days, the late 90s. The car floats over the top, does move around more, and is fast down Conrod straight. It’s the same for everyone and we’ve just got to make the best of it come Sunday.”
Zane Goddard
“I’m feeling pretty good after practice two. I unfortunately didn’t do the best final lap when we needed it, apart from that it was good with the 4th place, a solid start to the weekend. The track feels good and is quite fun in these cars. The top is definitely a little bit scary than the old car, it moves around a little bit more. You’ve got to pay a bit more attention to it, which is where I think the race will be good but full on. The car feels good out of the gate and is doing what we want it to do. There are a couple of little things we’ll look at tuning, but we’ll work hard with Wes (McDougall) tonight and see what we deliver for the rest of the weekend.”
Friday 06/10
Practice 3 – 23rd (2:06.8896)
Practice 4 – 20th (2:06.3508)
Qualifying – 20th (2:05.8511)
Craig Lowndes
“It was a productive day, I think again we learned a lot. From now onwards is when we will focus on the race car which is what we did a little bit of today. The car flows quite nicely in certain areas but we need to float it better over the top of the mountain, that goes for both of us. Once we can do that, it will also help the tyre life. Our aim and focus is a fast race car, we’ll review what we’ve done today and keep working on producing some solid results.”
Zane Goddard
“I’m feeling pretty good. We’re probably starting a little further back than we would like to be but we’ll work on the race car tomorrow. The race is a long one on Sunday and anything can happen. It’s still been a positive day, we learned a fair bit which is always good. We’ll see what we can work out tonight for tomorrow and we’ll go from there.”
Saturday 7/10
Craig Lowndes/Zane Goddard – Car #888
Practice 5 – Third (2:06.5577)
Practice 6 – 18th (2:08.0122)
Craig Lowndes
“Yet another positive day, we took a lot of lessons that we learned yesterday and tried to put them into action today. Yesterday the car was not quite flowing as nicely as we would have liked across the top of the mountain. But we’ve seemed to be able to improve on that today. Which will be important come race time. Both Zane and I were really happy with that improvement. Again, I think it’s going to come down to tyre life and management. The race run that we did today gave us a good indication of what this is going to be like tomorrow. We know we have a fast race car and my goal is to beat the Wildcard result which was 8th last year.”
Zane Goddard
“It was a pretty good day today. Practice is all finished up, we’ve got warm-up tomorrow morning and then it’s the big race. Again it was a productive day. The team made a fair few changes overnight which seemed to be very positive. We ended in P3 for the co-driver session this morning. We then did a lot more race run stuff in the last practice and seemed pretty competitive. I’m looking forward to the race tomorrow, it should be good.”
Sunday 8/10
Craig Lowndes/Zane Goddard – Car #888
Race 24 – 24th
Craig Lowndes
“I think we were confident going into the race today, we had worked hard to make a nice race car and that’s what I felt we had. In my first stint, the gear lever mount broke, from that point on we were playing catch up for the rest of the race. I do have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever been with a team who worked so hard for such a little result. I think we might’ve set a new record for the amount of times we came in and out of the pits. In the end, with all the gear linkage problems we also lost sixth gear as well. It was a disappointing result, however overall, the team worked unbelievably hard to get us the result we did. Zane also worked incredibly hard, we didn’t put a foot wrong. I think if we had our time over again, we had a car that could’ve made the top six, in that sense there is a slight disappointment, however, we all worked damn hard to achieve the result we did.”
Zane Goddard
“I’m pretty gutted, not just for myself but for the whole team. For what happened which was out of their control slightly, sucks. Especially with the amount of effort that was put into these cars by every team member, it’s pretty devastating. There were so many hours put in behind the scenes. Something so simple could be the un-doing. I also feel for Broc because he was on for a great result. A big congrats to both Shane and Richie for their result, it was super well deserved. Their result has provided a bit of good for the team this weekend. We had a really good car pace, I feel. Seeing that we couldn’t change gears we were still up there with our times. Although the result today wasn’t what we were hoping, we managed to deliver a good result in Sandown. It’s been a pleasure working with the whole team this year.”
