Latest / Full Credit to the Noise / Gold Coast 500 daily: Friday
Transcript
- GC daily Friday: Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of our daily podcast from the Gold Coast 500. My name is Andrew Van Loren, and sitting across from me is Speed Cafe's managing editor, Stefan Bartholomew. Stefan, we're significantly drier than we were upon returning from the track yesterday. For all the dire predictions, it wasn't actually that wet today, at least when the cars were on track. Yeah, two of the three sessions were dry. Felt sorry for the teams that there was a massive downpour this morning when they were doing pit stop practice. Yep. So cars and people came back into the garage pretty quickly then. But yeah, of course, wet practice one and then drive for the rest of the day. So the headline act today was a 30 minute qualifying session which set the grid positions eleven to twenty-four for tomorrow's opening race, but also sorted out our top ten shootout runners. So I'll run through them in order. on provisional pole is Anton Di Pasquale, second was Brock Feeney, third Matt Payne. Fourth, Andre Heimgartner, fifth, Chaz Most. Sixth, Ryan Wood. Seventh, Will Brown. Eighth, Tommy Randall. Ninth, Kai Allen, and tenth, Cameron Waters. So there were eight of our finals contenders in that top ten. The two interlopers were Heimgartner and Tommy Randall, obviously. Let's start with Anton. I mean, so much focus on that team and so much focus on that driver coming in to the weekend. Anton spoke in the press conference about how. There wasn't really any additional pressure compared to the pressure you always feel when you arrive at a professional sporting event as an athlete and and try and do your best. But you'd have to think that must feel pretty good for that team tonight. At the very least, it's a great story to see them come out on top. quite a few people have said to me that Anton would be coming here driving pretty angry. Mm-hmm. But you can't tell with him, can you? No. Because he's just so level. Yep. you'd never know. But I would think that after the shock of what happened. wore off, he would have been pretty annoyed at how that went down. So there was some really strong comments from Adrian Burgess on the broadcast today on Fox Sports. Yeah. Likening the the defeat at Bathurst to losing your firstborn child, which was just extraordinary, some of the things that he said. But clearly it was a yeah devastating defeat for them and they've bounced back in a really good way today. any shocks in terms of inclusions in the top ten? I guess that's a pretty impressive effort from Andre Heimgartner, who did lead the way for the Toyotas at Bathurst. and I think there were some comments from him after that about how that was you know the best executed sort of race that they have had so far this year, apart from the one that he won in Tasmania from memory. Yeah. but yeah, that's a pretty strong showing from him and with Mosterton Wood right behind him. You would think that after a pretty anonymous Bathist across both those Twitter teams, that'd be a a nice bounce back as well. Yeah, it's hard to know with this super where it's gonna go well and where it isn't. But there were some suggestions it would be a lot better suited here than than Bathus, clearly that exposed some some weaknesses. And for them to have three in the top six and Andre to be there within a tenth of provisional poll. So all three brands in the top four and within a tenth is is a pretty good thing. So we have two non-finals drivers in the top ten. That means we have two finals drivers who didn't make the shootout and will start in the positions that they qualified already for the race tomorrow. The the big ticket item out of that is Brody Kastecki. He ended up 11th, just missed out on the shootout. That one you know he would have been coming here looking for redemption. This is the race that that derailed well the event that derailed his title hopes last year. This is a far from derailing scenario. Obviously the car's in one piece for starters, but you would think he would have been a bit disappointed not to not to make the single lap dash tomorrow. Yeah, and he said that he'd he'd made a mistake at the critical moment at the end of his his lap that cost him, but also that he didn't feel like he would have been in the shootout anyway, 'cause he'd been struggling in a couple of areas. He said turn four and then the back straight, which is obviously interconnected there. So yeah, he did stress that he feels they'll be fine overall, but interesting in a session where you do get multiple cracks at green ties. It was very much like the Bathis Friday session where yeah he didn't manage to get it together on on any of them. Jack LeBrock will start seventeenth. He came into this weekend with the most ado to keep his season going and to stay in contention for the title and he's got even more to do now starting down there. You'd think he'd be praying for rain, but even then That's a long way back in the pack at a circuit like this where you're just at so much risk of getting caught up in someone else's mistake, even if you don't make one on your own. Yeah, obviously it's been a little bit of a comeback for Matt Stone Racing, Zach Bates there in thirteenth after the heroics at at Baths, but still pretty pretty respectable, especially for Zach's first time on this track. Yeah. so if it wasn't for what happened at Bathus, we'd be saying, Great job, Zach Bates. But just going back to Jack LeBrock, obviously the headline of his session was him being impeded by Will Brown heading into the final corner. It was one of those ones where Will had a he was on a warming lap. He had a couple of cars behind him also on warming laps and then didn't get told by his triple eight team that there was this car, Jack LeBron, on a on a flyer. And Will did dive out of the way at the last second, but the Stewards deemed that he impeded. Now there's also a fair bit of focus on Two drivers coming into this round. That is Jared Hughes, who is making his solo debut with Erebus and Cooper Murray, who vacated Erebus to move to premiere, effectively making way for Jared Hughes to come into the series as a full timer. interesting day for both of those guys. I've got to say, I mean, we spoke a fair bit in the lead up about really hoping Erebus had a handle on how difficult the gold coast could and should be for a young driver. making their solo main game debut, but eighteenth in qualifying for Hughesy, what was he? One, two, three, four four positions ahead of Job Stewart, who's been in that team all year, I think that was pretty impressive. Yeah, amazing. And again, only one drive practice session to to figure it out beforehand makes it even more difficult. I certainly thought he would be in the last couple, especially on on the Friday. So yeah, to to be the top Erebus driver. And to be up there, very good. Not so good for the other side of the switch in terms of Cooper Murray finding the wall in that qualifying session. He did seem pretty quick at a couple of points during the day, but he was still P twenty, even though he crashed out of the session. Yeah. and he's ahead of Jaden Ojada who was twenty third, but we don't really have an answer at the moment on war. I have tried to reach out to Juice and haven't heard back from him by the time we recorded the podcast, but I assume something's not gone quite right there, whether it's a specific issue or or wrong setup direction or whatever. But yeah, I I actually thought I was quite impressed with Cooper's pace generally. but just made I think he hit the wall earlier in the day as well. So he's put a couple of marks on on his new car, but did a pretty good job of it in quality. And as you say, missed those final runs. On a day like today, you know, the track was obviously and street circus in general getting better. so to end up twentieth was s sort of shows where his car speed is. There was a few blokes having a crack at putting it in the fence in practice and not quite going all the way and doing the job, those BRT folks in the garage would have been wincing a few times when particularly Aaron Cameron was flirting with that wall there at turn three. Even in practice one in the wet, he was at maximum attack. Jimmy Golding topped that wet session, but P twelve in the end so didn't make the shootout. But did he have an issue, a shortcut or something, having gone reasonably quick in the first sector on his last run? I think yes. I think you're right, he went went very well in the first sector and it didn't finish the lap. Yeah, exactly. So what what did you think of the the look of that beach chicane and the obviously the tire bundles being back this year has been such a big talking point. How did you feel it sort of played out? I liked it. I actually think it worked. I we spoke about this in the news pod yesterday. They took out the turn ten. Tire bundle based on some feedback from drivers and all that sort of stuff. The feedback from drivers this evening, the guys in the press conference, for example, were very thankful that was the case. so I think it looked good. I do think it looked as good as last year, to be honest. what the guys in the press conference were saying was that it's all well and good when you're ripping around on your own and you've got a fairly good line of sight as to where the bundles are, what will be potentially sketchy is when you're in the pack and you're you're hard up behind someone and you can't really see exactly where the curb and the bundles is. And they were saying it's hard enough normally without the bundles. And that's going to be the real challenge tomorrow. So I still think there's a bit to play out to get a read on whether this is the right solution. But there are signs to me that maybe we are finally getting somewhere in terms of working out how to how to safely police that part of the circuit without taking the spectacle away. Yeah, it it looked like it used to when cars were two wheeling through there rather than four wheels off the deck. So the spectacle was good, but as you say, the the concern from the drivers is really yeah, the in the race, not being able to bail out if something goes wrong because if you if you do half bail out you hit a hundred and fifty kilo block of tires or whatever they whatever they are. So with a front bar that we know isn't anywhere near as good at doing that as the front bars on the Gen 2 cars. Yeah, I mean if you really hit them like James Golding did in twenty two. Yeah, the the next ten cars are going to have front bar damage. that is a very good point. Now one thing we didn't see today was a calendar announcement. There were a few whispers around last night that perhaps given the fact that it seemed that everything was going in the right direction and there'd been this commitment to the 14 rounds that we could get an official announcement, but sitting here right now it feels like it's not even something we're likely to see over this weekend. Yeah, this script has sort of flipped on this a little bit where before we had the seven teams that had agreed with race and they were saying fourteen events, we need this for the good of the sport. There were five teams holding out and now we've got this deal we reported yesterday between race and the five teams, which is different. Those guys are ready to go and apparently there's a little bit of angst in the camp amongst the seven teams now. So whether we see a calendar or not this weekend, we don't know at the moment. But yeah, it's almost ironic the way that is turned around. It's still good news that we're talking about fourteen rounds, but the twelve round talk does feel like it's kinda stopped. Yeah, definitely. So we will just wait and see how they figure that out. Absolutely. Anything else you wanna bring up before we close this thing down? Probably just Matt Payne at the end of the day to be P three there. having missed most of practice two, so the only drive practice session, after having that serpentine belt break on the engine of his Ford Mustang we'd seen earlier in after practice one, Triple Eight change the engine on Will Brown's car after a crank angle sensor issue. So man, these four drivers in this final series, they've gotta have this in the back of their mind that there's some reliability question marks. You can imagine that the sensitivity around that in the triple eight garage is massive. Given what happened in Adelaide last year, even though they're running a completely different brand of car with a completely different brand of engine in it now. But that was a funny one. So it was a sensor issue. But I was talking to Jamie Winkup about this, and he said, by the time we get the sensors on the back of the of the motor, and he said, by the time we get to it, like fixing it's no not really any easier than just putting a new motor in. So that's why they decided to do that. And they had quite a debate about do we do it. between practice two and qualifying, but just decided to let's just get the job done. And we'll miss the first couple of minutes, I think, of that practice session while they were just finishing getting the getting that new engine in. but yeah, it this is kind of the intensity of finals, right? It's you have to make sure you got everything right and you have to go that extra mile to ensure that something doesn't go wrong tomorrow afternoon 'cause that could be really costly. Yeah, they were strapping up the injured player and sending him straight back out for the next quarter. But with Matt Payne, there was also where he'd reported feeling a bit of a vibration in his car in initially in practice two and then in in qualifying just on the downshift. Yeah, and some pulling on the brakes and that's yeah, again, I I feel like these these drivers would be feeling everything and hearing everything with a bit of concern. Yep, for sure. All right, let's leave it there. We will be back tomorrow with the Saturday edition of our daily podcast. And of course on speakfa.com we will have everything covered from what should be a very interesting day of supercars racing on the Gold Coast. So stay tuned to all that and we'll be back tomorrow evening.