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All calm at Tickford

Waters racing hard

By Thomas Miles

Despite losing the championship lead and not scoring a single podium at Albert Park, there is no sign of panic inside the Tickford garage.

After Cameron Waters crushed the opposition at the Sydney 500, the lack of Tickford Mustangs at the front of the field was noticeable at the Melbourne SuperSprint.

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This was particularly apparent in qualifying where Waters qualified 22nd and 19th for races 4 and 6 respectively.

However, the Monster Mustang still gobbled up many in the field when it was time for racing as Waters somehow salvaged top 10 results in both of those races despite limited laps.

With these comeback drives backed up by a P6 on Saturday, the Mildura product still walked away with a solid haul of points, but it was not quite enough to stop Will Brown from snatching the championship lead.

Meanwhile, teammate Thomas Randle only appeared in the top 15 once thanks to a special drive on Thursday, which saw him slip from sixth to ninth in the championship.

Although the Sydney speed was not replicated, Waters’ race pace and his improvement of 14 spots in the back to back Saturday qualifying sessions provide enough proof for Tickford to know there is no need to overreact.

In fact, the team’s ability to regain ground and improve across the weekend shows its in a much stronger position than previous years.

“Our qualifying pace was not up to spec initially, but we got on top of that even though it did not quite show up and we are still very happy with our race pace,” Tickford Team Manager Matt Roberts told Auto Action.

“We will go back to the workshop and try to identify why we were not fast on Thursday qualifying.

“The team is pushing pretty hard and in a much better space at the moment.

“Our systems and processes are a lot cleaner and efficient so we can draw on all our past history and learn from that.

“The team has expressed that especially in the last six months and hopefully we can continue that.”

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