THREE SECONDS FROM A NISSAN VICTORY

Rick Kelly scored his first double podium in seven years at Phillip Island – Photo: Rhys Vandersyde

It was a successful weekend for Nissan Motorsport as Rick Kelly scored his first double podium in seven years and Michael Caruso joined his team boss in the top five in Sunday’s race.

Kelly finished third in Race 10 after leading during the middle stint of the race, but he was unable to pit earlier due to the fuel drop allowing Scott McLaughlin and David Reynolds the undercut.

“What cost us the win was the 3-seconds I lost in the first stint on tyres, the car just wasn’t as nice as we’d like and we dropped those crucial 3-seconds,” Kelly said post-race.

“We short-filled, came out in front and the car in the middle sector tyres was really balanced.

“We managed to gap the field by 3-3.5s. At that point, I thought we were okay, but these guys had just enough hose-time and they had space in their tank to pit a couple of laps earlier than us and we lost it again.”

Kelly admitted after Saturday’s race that the team “traditionally try and tune the shit out of it overnight,” which has seen the team go backwards on the Sunday, but the car was relatively unchanged and rewarded the team with another podium.

“People progress from Saturday to Sunday, we try and do the exact same thing,” Kelly continued.

“It’s only natural for any human to try and do better, so we’ve just been trying to control ourselves a little bit with the changes from Saturday to Sunday, especially when we have a great car thinking that the appropriate changes will produce a similar result.”

Rick Kelly leading behind the Safety Car – Photo: Rhys Vandersyde

The pace shown by the team allowed each of Nissan Motorsport’s four Altimas to take an aggressive strategy by pitting early and short-filling during that stop, which occurred due to the speed shown by the Altimas.

“It’s confidence in your speed.”

“By lap 3 yesterday we knew we had pace and he put me in early, got me in clear track and drove past people in that gap through the strategy. You can’t do that when you haven’t got pace, you just have to deal with it. This weekend we had pace, we capitalised on the strengths of our team, which is the engineering, the reliability of the car and the pit crew we’ve got as well.”

There is still work to do for the Nissan team, but the result has added confidence heading to Barbagallo.

“We have a little bit more work to do like why the car is good at the start and middle of the race and not as strong at the end and also this is a big difference in car speed around some of the corners,” Kelly explained.

“There is a big difference in car speed around some of the corners. It’s exciting to see those differences from inside the cockpit, we can look at what we need to do to make our car as strong as theirs and tweak.

“There are some places that we are strong and that we can hopefully build on.”

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