Kelly Racing
26 SEP 2020
Challenging afternoon for Kelly Racing at The Bend
Today Kelly Racing returned to The Bend Motorsport Park in South Australia for the second consecutive weekend of racing at the venue. While at the same location, Round 10 of the Championship this week is ran on West Circuit as opposed to the International layout used previously.
The layout change saw the back section of the track replaced by a tight and technical hairpin section for a much shorter lap. While similar overall to the layout that the team has seen success at previously, today posed a set of new challenges on a number of fronts.
Adding in the tight turn six hairpin provided a new engineering challenging as the focus shifts further towards low-speed cornering grip and traction. The weather was also significantly cooler which effects the tyre wear and grip in qualifying, particularly in qualifying.
In practice both Rick Kelly and André Heimgartner looked quick in the team's Ford Mustangs. Both drivers were around the top-ten and quick through the first and third sectors, however the middle sector which includes the turn 6 hairpin was proving to be more challenging.
In qualifying both drivers comfortably made it through the first session. In the second session Rick unfortunately made a small error at turn one on his final flying lap on green tyres and ran wide which meant his best lap time in the Castrol Mustang was only quick enough for P16. André was quick enough to proceed through to the Top-15 Shootout but had a tough time getting through the tight complex from turn six to turn eight with a lot of wheelspin. His lap put the NED Whisky Mustang in P11 for the start of this afternoon's race.
In the race both drivers had a solid start, each moving up one place on the first lap. Unfortunately Rick received contact from Hazelwood on lap four and was spun off the road and sent to the rear of the grid. The Castrol team's race was further impacted when the car's engine stalled during the pit stop and Rick finished the race in P23.
André went with the undercut pit stop strategy, stopping early on lap six. The strategy didn't work as well as it did last weekend, and André lost track position to several cars when re-joining the race and didn't have the pace to fight back. André finished today's race in P14.
The team now looks forward to making some improvements to the cars overnight and returning to the track tomorrow with more pace.
André Heimgartner, #7 NED Racing
"Today was a little frustrating, we just went the wrong way with the setup for the race and didn't really have the pace to challenge the cars ahead. We also spent the majority of the race in traffic so it was difficult to push in clear air and make up ground before and after the pit stop so we just lost track position with the timing of the stop."
"We'll try and fix the car overnight, extract some more performance out of it and hopefully have a better day. There's definitely a lot more potential there, we just need a few tweaks in the right direction."
Rick Kelly, #15 Castrol Racing
"We've made some significant changes to the car with the engine and moved a few things around to hopefully unlock a bit more performance. The potential in the car theoretically is better now, we just have to learn a little bit more about it."
"It's produced a very different car on new versus old tyres and we were battling with that all day which put us on the back foot in qualifying and then you've got a tough job in the race."
"We got spun around at the hairpin in the first few laps which was unfortunate and then the engine cut out in the pit stop which put us a long way back. The positive is we had fantastic pace from there and caught right back up to the back of the pack, we just need to use that tomorrow and try understand a bit more about unlocking the pace on a green tyre because that's our weakness at the moment."
