WAU Frustrated By Super Soft Performance
Chaz Mostert may have been the star of the Saturday race in Darwin thanks to a poor run in qualifying, but a repeat performance in the short session on Sunday morning left the Walkinshaw Andretti United team frustrated and perplexed.
Mostert qualified 22nd and 20th in each of the races in Darwin, and Ryan Wood was 24th in both. However, Mostert was unable to replicate his Saturday heroics on Sunday and climbed only four spots after his mercurial 17-spot rise the previous day.
“Yeah, a very frustrating weekend,” the team’s CEO, Bruce Stewart, said late on Sunday. “We struggled to turn on the Super Soft tyre, and that lack of one-lap pace hurt us all weekend.
“We were happy about coming through the pack to come fifth, but ultimately if you’re not qualifying at the front your not giving yourself a chance to win the race, and that is what we’re here for.
“The race package was pretty good, not as sharp as we wanted and not as good today.
“We were competitive and had a superior race package than most on Saturday, but on Sunday, as is the nature of the sport, everyone tunes up, finds other ways, and becomes a lot more competitive.
“Chaz was only a tenth outside the top 10, but you need four of five-tenths to be where we want to be. So, let’s not kid ourselves about trying to find a way into P9 in the top 10 shootout. That’s not what we’re about.”
Mostert dominated the racing in Perth, winning both races (albeit losing one with a penalty for an unsafe release in his pitstop) and being the fastest car in the races. But that was in the Dunlop soft tyre. The Super Softs, for WAU, have traditionally proved more of an issue.
“I’m not sure how to put it in an analogy, but it’s like going from winter to summer or vice versa. No matter how you bake it, it’s a hard one to swallow and we’re just going to make sure we learn from this and make every post a winner to improve our team for Townsville, which must be our focus.”
He said the debrief this week would be as frank as it needs to be and that his team needs to own the challenge around the Super Soft.
“You know me, I’m not an engineer, but from my sort of 101 knowledge, I would say it seems to be a key area where we struggle. We have much better qualifying on hard and soft tyres, but the Super Soft caught us out here last year.
“We were off the pace completely at Sandown last year, too, so you just put a few of those factors together and go, OK, we’ve got work to do to put our head around it.”
He did smile when he reminded Auto Action that Townsville is not a Super Soft race weekend in three weeks’ time.
