Phillip Island Drivers View

26 April 2017

Read Frosty's thoughts after podium at the Island.

DRIVERS’ VIEW

Mark Winterbottom – #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford:
“Phillip Island is a good event. We’ve had some good battles there in the past and a few good results. If we can get our setup right I think we can be pretty quick but it will be really important for us to get on top of that early. Degradation will play a big part in both races as well so a focus for us will be nailing a setup that looks after our tyres but also gives us the speed that we need.” 

Mark Winterbottom – #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford:

Practice 1: 15th – 1m31.72s
Practice 2: 6th – 1m30.17s
“I’m struggling with understeer quite a lot. We tried to get it better but it wasn’t really turning, it was more sliding to make the car quicker. We’ll have a look at it and try and improve it for tomorrow. I messed up the first sector as well so we’re probably more third on the track but yeah obviously Chaz’s car is quite a bit better so we’ll have to try and go down his path a bit and get our car better. We’ve had a pretty good day which is a nice change for once as opposed to what we’ve been having recently.” 

Mark Winterbottom – #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 4th – 1m29.77s
Race 5: 8th
“It was just a weird day. You’re in conservation mode so you’re driving around getting told to do a second and a half off the pace you can do because the tyres aren’t up to it. It’s frustrating because it’s not really racing, its just conservation. Serving the penalty was the killer. We would have been top three and had a good result. The blend line normally has a cone where you blend in and when you’re following a car you can’t see where you’re going so it’s a pretty steep penalty. I knew the rule but you just can’t see so you follow the car in front. We should have had a podium but thankfully no tyres blown. There were blisters on our tyres so we weren’t far away from it. It was a pretty average racing day, for people watching as well so we’ll try and fix it.” 

Mark Winterbottom – #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 4th – 1m29.67s
Race 6: 2nd
“It was a really good race. To get back on the podium is really cool and obviously you always want to win but to do it behind a teammate is the next best scenario. I’m really happy with it. It’s good for my confidence and good for Brendan (Hogan) my engineer’s confidence because the first couple of rounds have been horrible. It’s good to have confidence knowing we’re going the right direction. We were competitive today. We tuned the car up, the engineers did all of the work to take the load off the tyre so it’s good that it was still fast enough and safe which is pretty hard to do so they did a good job. It was good to finish trouble-free.”

 

 

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