Anton De Pasquale reflects on the Supercars action on the streets of Surfers Paradise in his latest The Distiller column, exclusive to Speedcafe.com.
Hey everyone,
Well, Gold Coast is done and dusted. It was a pretty good race event, I think it met the hype and everyone was pretty excited to be there.
It definitely delivered — the weather was awesome and heaps of people came out, so that was really cool to see so much cool stuff going on.
Home event for me — I was born in Victoria but live on the Goldy now since joining the Shell V-Power Racing Team.
It’s always different when you race at home; when you go away for events, generally you have your set routine that just happens naturally, but at home that changes slightly.
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I don’t live too far from the track, but parking and all that stuff is a massive nightmare.
I had my parents staying with me, so mum just dropped me off every day to the closest gate and that kind of made life a bit easier — didn’t have to worry about parking the car and stuff.
Racing at home doesn’t change too much. You still spend most of the days at the track trying to go fast.
The only real difference is you drive your own car instead of a hire car, sleep in your own bed, and get to use your own shower, that’s really about it.
The on-track stuff for us wasn’t amazing.
On Saturday, we didn’t have a huge amount of race pace so we kind of just raced around where we started.
We didn’t really have much of a fight too far forward, we weren’t too threatened from cars behind, and there were no Safety Cars or anything that shook it up.
We made a heap of changes overnight and my qualifying pace was a little bit better on the Sunday.
My shootout lap was shaping up to be pretty good and then I just had a big rear lock into Turn 11.
Until then, the lap was the best one I had been on all weekend — it would have been nice to finish it and start on the front two rows or something, but it wasn’t meant to be.
You spend the whole lap worried about your kerb hops and stuff and then you end up making a mistake somewhere you don’t normally.
In the Sunday race we started in tenth and the day was pretty wild with the red flags — there was a bit more that went on during Sunday’s 250km race for sure!
Just glad everyone is okay after that huge crash.
In the end, Car #11 got disqualified post-race for breaching the minimum tyre pressure.
You never want to end the day with zero points, but it is what it is.
This is one of those things, it happens every now and again, but it wasn’t the best race for us anyway.
Some things didn’t fall our way, but the DSQ is never good next to your result.
Adelaide is going to be another massive event, so we’re pretty excited to get there again for the first time in a while. Another street track and we’ll aim to end the year strong.
Anton
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