Tasmania Round 3

Frosty's thoughts

DRIVERS’ VIEW
No. 5 The Bottle-O Ford Falcon FG X
Mark Winterbottom
“I’m excited to get back to Tassie, it’s a track that’s been pretty good in the past for our team, and I think the track will suit our cars, so I’m looking forward to getting down there. I’m also looking forward to the new qualifying format, with practice times qualifying you, and sort of an elimination format will help limit the number of cars on track at any one time. I think that’s actually a good format for our calendar, so I’m really excited for that. Obviously the weather down there is always an unknown so it should be interesting, but if it’s a pretty straightforward race our cars have been notoriously good there and our history’s been good, so I’m looking forward to getting there and seeing what we’ve got.”

Friday thoughts:

“It was all right. We were productive, got through a few things. Each session we were in the top ten, which was nice, and we saved a set of tyres for qualifying tomorrow. We know the areas we need to tune it up and make it better. Hopefully we get on top of it overnight, roll out tomorrow and fix the dramas. A pretty good day, I think in Adelaide we had good pace, and the Grand Prix was not good, but we’ve sort of found ourselves again. It feels better when you’re in the ten, so today was pretty good.” 

Race 7 Start: 15th, 51.10s
Race 7  Finish: 14th  
“It was a rough day. We had a car good enough to make it to Q3 but had an air box fire that killed our run and put us towards the back. We were good in the beginning of stints but after a few laps I’d lose the front tyre so we’d be stuck wherever we were. The nice thing is the car has pace, we just have to find a way to maintain it.”

Race 8 Start: 12th, 50.95s
Race 8 Finish: 12th  
“It was a really tough weekend to be honest. We tried a lot of different things on my car. We went completely different on my setup personally, and tried some bits we hadn’t put on my car in a long time to try and help my front tyre degradation, and we got about the same result. We’ve got work to do, but at the same time we’ve got smart people in this team and four good drivers with good data to pull from. We’ve been in this situation before and we’ve bounced back, so I have no doubt we can fix it, I’m just sorry to people who support us. We know we’re better than what we showed this weekend. We know we expect more, and we’ll work hard to fix it.”