Heimgartner and NED Racing claim top-10 in Darwin

Aiden Taylor 15 August 2020

User Rating: 5 / 5

Today the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship returned to the race track for Round Five of the Championship at Darwin’s Hidden Valley Raceway. The team arrived in Darwin on Monday after a big road trip from the Gold Coast and immediately got to work assembling its race engines.

The team found an issue with its cylinder heads just before leaving the Gold Coast, fortunately repairs were able to be made on the Gold Coast with parts freighted up in time for this weekend. Team Owner Todd Kelly spent a two days on the tools assembling the Ford Mustang race engines and fortunately the team flew through today’s running without any mechanical issues.

In practice, both Rick Kelly and André Heimgartner showed strong pace. The team ran as high as P4 with Rick in the Castrol Racing Mustang, while André wasn’t far behind in the NED Whisky car coming as high as P6 in practice.

The team then turned its focus to qualifying for Race One and both drivers made it through the two qualifying sessions to secure a place in the Top-15 Shootout. The team elected to retain its green soft tyres for tomorrow’s sessions and both drivers did their shootout laps on used hard compound rubber. André claimed P13 on the grid with Rick alongside him in P14.

Today’s race was a mixed bag for the team, unfortunately Rick experienced an unfortunate chain of events after being ran off the track by Le Brocq, ending with a drive-through penalty. He was quite lucky to finish P15 in the end after several other drivers had time penalties or DNFs.

André was able to avoid trouble and have a relatively uneventful race in the NED Mustang. He had a clean start, drove a measured race and scored another top-ten finish in ninth place.

The team used its allocation of hard compound Dunlop tyres exclusively today, putting the team in a good position to maximise tomorrow’s performance. Both drivers will have two fresh sets of the quicker soft tyres at their disposal.

QUOTES

André Heimgartner, #7 NED Racing

“It was a fairly action-packed race today, there was quite a lot of contact but we managed to stay mostly out of that. We got bent steering about a quarter of the way through the race after copping a nudge from another driver which slowed us down a little, but we can easily fix that and it’s pretty minor compared to the damage some of the other guy hads.”

“Overall fairly happy to get another top-ten, that’s always good for our team points. Now just looking forward to tomorrow, we had good pace today but we should be able to qualify better tomorrow on fresh tyres and have some good racing.”

Rick Kelly, #15 Castrol Racing

“It was a tough day for us out there. We had pretty good pace in Practice on the soft tyres, but we didn’t run the hard tyre in qualifying so our first laps on the hard tyre were in qualifying and the car wasn’t quite where it needed to be, it meant we ran two sets in Q1 to get through to Q2 and then we didn’t have a fresh set for the shootout.”

“The race really didn’t go our way, we got a decent start and avoided a little carnage on lap one and dropped a couple of spots but then got ran off the track by Le Brocq and then rejoined the track to find another car right next to me, got a drive-through penalty for dangerous re-entry.”

“We came in and got some fresh tyres under the safety car to try and fight back but couldn’t make too much progress, we were just lucky a few other guys got time penalties and we got P15. We’re also in a good position for tomorrow with all our soft tyres to play with.”

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Heimgartner and NED Racing claim top-10 in Darwin

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