Latest / Full Credit to the Noise / Ipswich Super440 daily: Friday
Transcript
- Speedcafe Team: Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of our daily podcast from the Ipswitch Super 440. My name is Andrew Van Leo and I'm joined by Speed Cafe's managing editor, Stefan Bartholomew. Stefan, we're actually recording this at the track in the ⁓ s very nice Speed Cafe office here. ⁓ that was a pretty newsy and interesting day for a Friday in particular at ⁓ Queensland Raceway. It was. We had a team principals press conference at midday. With Jamie Winkup, Matt Stone, and Brenton Grove, which certainly ⁓ filled the gap for us before practice. It did. Let's ⁓ quickly run through what did happen on track or the kind of ⁓ an overview of what happened. So in the first session, it was Kai Allen from Brock Feeney and Declan Fraser. Obviously, the rookies do get some more tires, so we do tend to see this on Friday, where some of these rookie drivers pop up in some fairly impressive positions. And in the second session, it was Brody Kastecki, he got down. into the one minute eights ⁓ as did Brock Feeney who was second fastest and Chaz Mostett third fastest. But the big story out of practice was the fact that Will Brown, with all this hype around how he's going to go this weekend, missed more than twenty minutes of that last session with what turned out to be a terminal transaction transaxal failure. Yeah, he said ⁓ it sounded like there was someone underneath the car with a hammer, which is ⁓ never ideal. ⁓ in a way it it Probably takes the pressure off him a little bit tomorrow. Gives him a bit of an out in quality if he's not right up the front, having lost that track time for sure. Yeah, but in a way it it also puts ⁓ spotlight on the fact that they committed to changing chassis for him and then they found this problem but then they still rolled out this car that's it's brand new. It went to the wind tunnel, Jamie Winkup shook it down here ⁓ earlier in the year before Daniel Ricardo drove it out at Calder, but it's not turned a racing lap, so That was one of the ⁓ things where I do wonder if they ⁓ they'd thought twice about doing that, considering they found what they are claiming to have been the problem. Daniel Ricardo hard on the gear. That's what ⁓ that's what I'm hearing out of this. But they did manage to get Will back on track. ⁓ we kind of wanted down to the to the triple eight garage to to see what the score was ⁓ after the post practice press conference. And by the time we got down there we sort of looked at the car and went, This thing looks like it's about ready to roll out on track. And there was ⁓ passenger ride session at five o'clock and they managed to get a n a new transaxle into the car. They obviously recognized the other one was completely cooked pretty quickly, so there wasn't a lot of diagnostic work required. They got a new transaxle and the passenger seat into the car in around an hour and they rolled out for that session, which I spoke to Mark Dutton about it and he said it's pretty important because as confident as they are in putting a new major component from the drive line in the car and rolling straight into a qualifying session. Twenty five minutes of track time, even with a passenger w with passengers in the car, that's that's a really nice little shakedown. Yeah. Handy for them, but obviously not not a good day. Better on the other side of the garage with Brock in second. He seemed pretty happy with how his day went, although did sort of caution the fact that they have rolled out okay occasionally and then it's fallen apart in qualifying. ⁓ but Brody, those guys have been good at that rolling out well. thought he made some interesting comments afterwards about the ⁓ supercar's tyres seem to be allergic to their own rubber and how much the balance ⁓ sort of changed through the sessions 'cause we had even some support races on the card before getting to supercar's practice. But the job these days for the teams is really, in Brody's words, to be fortune tellers and predict what the grip level is gonna be like tomorrow for qualifying after practice today. Yeah, absolutely. But ⁓ and ⁓ Matthew Payne, I think he was fourth in both sessions, so again, not like headline speed, but kind of exactly where he needs to be to wrap up that sprint cup this weekend. Although Brenton Grove did say in the press ⁓ earlier that the sprint cup's not really their focus or all that important, yeah. ⁓ which ⁓ sort of went against the grain of ⁓ that being a a nice box for them to tick. Well it's ⁓ at complete odds to what Matt Payne told me in an interview that I did. For ⁓ the Authentic Collectibles Role Models podcast with him just after Perth, where he was talking about what a huge milestone it would be to go out there and and win win that trophy. It reminded me a bit of ⁓ twenty thirteen when ⁓ Supercars had introduced the Enduro Cup and Jamie Winkup at a press conference on the Gold Coast had said, ⁓ this is not important to me at all. Like why are you asking me these questions? I'm trying to win the championship. Yeah. And ⁓ certainly the people from Purtek ⁓ nearly had a conniption in the ⁓ in the back of the press conference when that happened. But yeah, I mean clearly the they've got bigger goals at Groves. Yeah. And I'm not surprised that the team isn't going into the weekend, spending lots of time looking at the the points equations and how they can win the Sprint Cup. It sort of just happens as a function of doing their jobs properly. Yeah, for sure. Which is the point he was really making. But yeah, it was a notable ⁓ comment from the day. But he did make specific comment that the twenty-five points are far more important than the than the trophy. ⁓ whereas I think we touched on this in our preview video, it feels like the way that the final series can play out, that this does kind of mean something because this is the largest portion of the season and this is representative of consistent performance over a large part of the season. And then Brenton just said, nope, you're wrong. That's not that's not what we think about it. So that was interesting. Let's have a chat about that press conference because there was a fair bit that did come out of it. starting with Jamie Wink up talking about the whole restrictor thing. What was your take on what he had to say? He talked through a little bit about how it's easy to say, you know, we should have found this faster. but you know, we were under the assumption that that part was the right race ready part for the car, which is at odds to what supercars has said. ⁓ You asked him if Supercars had specified that it was to go back to Supercars or not at least not be used in a race application, and he basically said, I don't know or I don't remember ⁓ which I thought was was quite interesting, but it still feels like that team feels that supercars played a very big role in this happening. Yeah, I guess Jamie's sort of his comments are sort of on both sides of it in terms of We made the assumption, but then he gave the footy analogy of the teams don't have to test the the pressure of the ball when before it gets bounced at the start of a footy match, ⁓ which puts sort of the onus back on supercars. Yeah. a bizarre twist in all of this when Will Brown was handed the actual restrictor, yeah. By Mark Larkham during practice two on the TV and it had been engraved by supercars. ⁓ for that presentation, which ⁓ I guess is a bit of fun. It sort of struck me as a little bit of an odd look. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I I mean Will took it really well because that's that's Will. ⁓ he's probably gonna sell it, let's be honest. Yeah, probably. ⁓ he'll put it in something that he's selling that has a a different restrictor and is better than that one. ⁓ but ⁓ yeah that was that was kind of interesting. But yeah I sort of found that the the whole there is still this ob obviously this ⁓ This sense at Triple Eight that they were kind of dotted here and that yes they should have found it earlier. I I do totally understand all of the reasoning behind why it's not that easy to find these things. And Jamie Winkup talked about the fact that, you know, if you can if you get into the minutiae of the data enough, you can start chasing ghosts. ⁓ but there was a pretty obvious ghost sitting there that they weren't chasing and they probably should have been chasing it. So yeah, it was it was a a an interesting take. But again, the context is the fact that they were chasing a lot of different things at the same time. It's not like Brock's car was just cruising through winning every race with a package they knew really well. Yeah. And and will it's not like he was dominating last year either and all of a sudden was struggling. So you can ⁓ certainly look a lot smarter in hindsight than it would have been at the time for them to actually find it. Yeah, another bit of fun from ⁓ the press comments was Brenton Grove really unloading on Will Brown and Brody Gastecki about comments that they had made ⁓ about just how advantageous starting those tie pressures lower than allowed in Perth could be. Brody did say that it could have been three two or three tenths of a second per lap while those tyres were on the car. Brenton definitely didn't like that. He said that mathematics is obviously not their strong suit. those two boys and was pretty direct about the fact that yeah, he wasn't happy that there were these wild claims being made about how much faster that car was because of the fact that the tires dipped under the minimum. I think from memory Brody was comparing the pressures that ⁓ his team rolled out of the the garage with compared to what Kai's had actually dipped to. It wasn't a complete ⁓ apples and apples scenario but Brenton's focus on ⁓ Will and Brody's comments did ⁓ it was very directly channeled, sort of ignoring the fact that everyone up and down the pit lane and supercars ⁓ were not happy with it. In fact, ⁓ not long after Brenton was talking about that, Mark Larkin was on the broadcast showing that Kai's tie pressures were less than Matt's for almost the whole stint. Yeah. It might have actually been the whole stint, and certainly at the end of the stint they were still under. So he was talking about the advantage. But yeah, certainly still a lot of discontent in the paddock here about ⁓ how that all played out and and calls in that presser for a black and white DSQ, which again, as we discussed yesterday on the news pod, I'm not quite sure I I fully agree with that in terms of you use the Bathus one thousand example. So that's why here this weekend, the fact that ⁓ Supercars has said to the teams that if you are under on the grid, you can pit at the end of the formation lap, change the tyre, start from pit line. That actually does look like a fairly neat solution to this ugly problem. It it really is because it's it's too big a penalty for it to ever be worth the performance advantage o of of doing of trying to run your pressures lower than you're meant to. and hopefully it does close off that argument of well there's nothing we can do to solve this problem, which was ⁓ a pretty as we believe a pretty key part of The Groves argument on the Sunday night in Perth. And as of yet I'm always wary of saying this, but there's no kind of really obvious unintended consequence of bringing a rule like that in. But that could be famous last words, so maybe I shouldn't say things like that. Yeah. But ⁓ yeah, there was a reference in the presser to it being a get out of jail free cards. Brenton did point out that it's not. And if you think about it, I guess you you sort of start in jail and then they they let you go once everyone else is ⁓ is already gone. Just to come back to Jamie Wincuff's comments about the restrictor thing, ⁓ another thing that you asked him was whether there was any concern that they could face, you know, r retrospective disqualifications for that car, given the fact it was running out of ESD for the first eight events of the season. It's a pretty it's it's a very relevant question. It's something that we have flagged with supercars not got an official response on, but we don't we understand that they're not. looking to to refer it to the stewards in any way because it was a performance disadvantage. and Jamie said pretty quickly they reached the same conclusion that they shouldn't be worried about it because it was a performance disadvantage. But you know, you talk about everyone talking about the tie pressures and that advantage. Like we've had people in the paddock tell us that there were advantages for Will Brown running that smaller restrictor. Well the whole year people have been talking about fuel consumption and pit lane time and all of that. So again none of these things are absolutely black and white to go back to that term that ⁓ it's not just that it robs a bit of horsepower at the top, there are other effects as well. Yeah. But ⁓ yeah, I guess on that, I mean the the pub test suggests that overall it's a disadvantage. They've they've penalized themselves and ⁓ supercars referring this to the stewards would have been a declaration of war basically would would have been ⁓ quite unfair. And then there would have been some ⁓ questions around, well, Triple Eight could have just reframed their story and said, ⁓ no, actually it wasn't. And there's probably some nuance around time frames in terms of protesting things and and stuff like that. Because we saw a lot of years ago, I think it was back in twenty fourteen, Scott Pye retrospectively got excluded from six or eight races because supercars had discovered that the ⁓ the engine sealed tags had been cut. Mm-hmm. ⁓ and so he got wiped from a bunch, but it wouldn't have quite been the same here 'cause it's not it's not a sealed component. Yeah. It can come in and out without supercars knowing. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Anything else we need to discuss out of the day, do you think? ⁓ no, I guess we're waiting for for a fine for B J R. ⁓ for the screwdriver. Did speak to Brad Jones earlier and he wasn't looking forward to ⁓ Having to pay five hundred bucks or a thousand or whatever it's gonna be for the fact that a screwdriver was left in the car. ⁓ he said that the boys just sort of fumbled it inside the car and it fell down the sill and they couldn't get it back out. And so they knew it was gonna probably come out on track. Yep. Yep, we'll wait and see when that one comes out. All right, I think we will leave it there. There's either a concert starting outside or Something's gone horribly wrong at the raft base down the road because there's lots of banging and crashing out there. But ⁓ as long as that ⁓ beautiful Peter Jackson Glenn Seaton racing falcon that's sitting between us and the ⁓ the pit lane is not disturbed by any of this, I don't mind because that is that is a hell of a thing to stop and look at every time I walk past. Aaron Seaton's even rolled out some. ⁓ Porteroy ⁓ retro hats for this weekend. ⁓ wow. You stepped it up further that ⁓ yeah, obviously inspired by the old PJ once. I know you love a free hat, so I'm sure there'll be one of those in your suitcase when you're heading back home in a few days. All right, let's leave it there. ⁓ stay tuned to speakafe.com. Tomorrow we'll have all of the action from Queensland Raceway and we'll be back in the podcast feed tomorrow night with the Saturday edition of our daily pods.