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Race Engineer Mirko De Rosa has returned to the Blanchard Racing Team at today’s pre-Bathurst test at Winton Motor Raceway.
De Rosa’s absence since the Hidden Valley event due to back surgery triggered a period of turbulence in the race engineer position, which coincided with further staffing change at the team.
It was expected he would be back to guide Tim Slade at next month’s Repco Bathurst 1000, however, he has made an appearance at Winton today.
Team owner and Slade’s co-driver Tim Blanchard confirmed his engineer’s return in a Supercars Facebook live video.
“We’ve got Mirko [De Rosa] back on deck today, which is the first time for two to three months that he is back on the tools for us,” said Blanchard.
“Which is fantastic and already makes a big change to the team having him here in the garage, so yeah looking forward to Bathurst.”
BRT is joined by Tickford Racing, Walkinshaw Andretti United, Grove Racing, Brad Jones Racing, and Matt Chahda Motorsport at the Victorian circuit.
Many teams have chosen to focus on giving the co-drivers laps as well as practising pit stops.
“Just getting some laps like everyone else and just doing some pit stop practice,” added Blanchard.
“Really getting our pad changes and everything sorted, all the usual pre-Bathurst routine stuff.”
It was recently confirmed that Team Manager of BRT, Brendan Hogan, has stepped away from Supercars to move into a new role on the automotive side of the CoolDrive business.
Practice 1 at Bathurst will get underway on Thursday, October 6 at 11:00 AEDT.
