BAPTISM OF FIRE FOR NEWCOMERS

Baptism of fire for newcomers – Photo: InSyde Media

Having taken over the Subaru TCR program seven weeks ago, Milldun Motorsport made its debut with the pair of ex-Kelly Racing WRXs at The Bend TCR Australia finale and believe there is untapped potential in the model to be found.

By HEATH McALPINE

The Melbourne-based team won the Victorian Rally Championship with the Japanese marque last year, so a transition to circuit racing and TCR provided itself when the cars became available. Driven by Barton Mawer and Matt Simmons, the pair of Subarus gradually improved during the weekend with Simmons finishing the third race with the eighth fastest lap time.

Milldun Motorsport director Liam Dunn reflected positively on the team’s first foray into TCR and believes there is plenty of promise in the package as further testing is planned ahead of next year’s campaign.

“The Subarus for us, we think there is a lot of unlocked potential we can get out of the cars,” Dunn told Auto Action.

“The brand is fantastic; we really believe in the Subaru product. We think there is a lot of potential in the car and given some time we’ll extract the potential out of it. In Sunday’s race we went eighth quickest, the results don’t show it but that’s where we’re at. For us, getting reliability out of the cars is key, we only DNF’d one race due to an incident on the last lap.”

“There was no mechanical DNF, for us that’s huge. To get outright lap times in the top 10, sure the results weren’t what we were hoping for, but it shows the speed is there.”

The team has already identified what needs to be completed to increase the competitiveness of the Subarus after testing at Winton, but racing at The Bend confirmed what the team’s thoughts thanks to the detailed input from the drivers.

“We’ve found what we want in the car, we know what we want to do to the car,” Dunn explained. “There’s a lot of things we want to execute to the car in a very short amount of time, we’ve done two test day. But coming to The Bend was massive in the way that the changes that we thought we wanted to make, now we know what we want to do.”

The Subaru is a heavy car and this is one of the items that Milldun plans to rectify, while communication with the homologation agent of the model, Top Run Motorsport in Italy is also planned.

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