Heimgartner through to Hidden Valley Top Ten Shootout
Andre Heimgartner has opened the weekend for Brad Jones Racing in fast fashion, notching up a top five result in practice before sneaking himself into the ten in qualifying.
The Supercars Championship has descended upon Darwin with a new format that saw cars qualifying for the Saturday race on Friday with a further Top Ten Shootout to decide the pointy end of the grid to come.
R&J Batteries driver Heimgartner was within touch of the fastest lap in practice with mere hundredths separating the top four cars.
From there he set a 1:06.0302 in Qualifying to lock himself into the Top Ten Shootout with some tyres to come.
The #14 will start Race 11 from 16th on the grid.
Pizza Hut Racing’s Macauley Jones had looked quick in the opening runs of Qualifying, finding himself in the top ten.
Jones however wasn’t able find rear grip on his subsequent outings in the session and couldn’t improve as the clock counted down, he will start from 20th.
The #96 crew also had a small shake up today with Race Engineer Andrew Donnelly coming down with an illness overnight, meaning Head of Engineering Paul Scalzo stepped in.
Grip issues also plagued team-mate Jaxon Evans in the SCT Logistics Camaro.
Evans had been able to show his form in Practice, sitting comfortably in the top ten for the majority of the hour-long session.
However his lap in qualifying puts him 21st for the first race of the Darwin Triple Crown.
The BJR stable heads out for Practice 2 tomorrow 9:35 ACST/10:05 AEST before the Shootout 11:35/12:05.
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Andre Heimgartner
Supercars driver, #8 R&J Batteries Camaro
"Our day was okay, we got in the top 10, so that's good. I think there's a lot more to come, I think we didn't quite nail in that qualifying but still managed to make the 10. So I think there's some more potential left in the car. I'll wait and see what tomorrow brings."
Bryce Fullwood
Supercars driver, #14 Middy's Electrical Camaro
"A odd one for us today, we rolled out with some different ideas from Perth, just chasing a bit of performance. And the car was really unhappy actually, it was a really odd car to drive. It was a bit of a shame. It didn't quite work out for us. Really tough first practice and being that we only had the one practice before qualifying, we didn't actually have time in the session to make the changes to change the car back. So we were kind of was stuck with it, we made a lot of changes for qualifying and the car was a lot better. It just meant that I had to adapt to it. And I did a pretty good job of it. We just probably made a small mistake with the car in the last part of quali. But I feel the the potential of the car was around the 10 or just outside the 10 so it's not all bad. I'm very happy considering what we had in first practice. I feel a lot more confident going into tomorrow's race after driving that car in qualifying."
Macauley Jones
Supercars driver, #96 Pizza Hut Camaro
"Pretty average day, not the best quali session but washappy with practice. Hopefully we'll make it better for tomorrow. Unfortunately Donners [Race Engineer, Andrew Donnelly] has been sick, so Scalz [Paul Scalzo, Head of Engineering] did a great job stepping in."
Jaxon Evans
Supercars driver, #12 SCT Logistics Camaro
"It's nice to be back in Darwin, felt like practice was pretty strong for us. We're pretty confident with where the car was. Although we were only 14th, we were sort of trending in the right direction. And then I don't know what happened in qualifying. We just missed something. Which, unfortunately, is not the first time that it's happened. I just felt like I didn't quite have what I needed and over drove in certain places when I shouldn't have and in the end, it was a pretty poor qualifying. So disappointed in that. So go back to the drawing board, got another practice tomorrow before the race. So we'll try to tune it up and move forward from there."