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The Shell V-Power Racing Team is buoyed by what it has been able to take away from a highly productive Supercars test day at Queensland Raceway.
Both of the Dick Johnson Racing Ford Mustangs, along with the rest of the Queensland-based entries, ran last week at the Ipswich circuit in what was, for most, their first in-season test of the Gen3 era.
The outing arguably carried even greater significance for the Stapylton-based squad than its rivals, given Will Davison is currently ninth in the championship and Anton De Pasquale 18th after a tough start to the campaign.
While clutch niggles blighted their pre-season, they were able to long plenty of laps this time around, with co-drivers Alex Davison and Tony D’Alberto also on hand.
“For us this test day was a long time coming; stuff that we’ve wanted to get under our belt and been looking forward to since probably Newcastle,” Team Principal Ben Croke told Speedcafe.
“For us, the test was a really good day. It’s hard to know what’s going to transpire out of it. Are we going to move forward to where we think we should be or want to be? We’ll be able to tell that in a couple of weeks’ time at Darwin.
“But for us, it was a really good day in terms of just [being] issue-free.
“We didn’t have any of the clutch issues that plagued our first block of testing at the start of the year, we were able to log a lot of trouble-free laps, some really good mileage, and a lot of good stuff for the engineers just to go through and try to really get our head around understanding what this car needs to perform.”
Asked then if DJR has expanded the metaphorical ‘toolbox’, Croke replied, “I think we have. Yeah, for sure.
“Even at Tassie, there were a few things that we did and it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, alright, that worked for us in the racing,’ and then at the test day, to be able to explore those opportunities and those settings a little bit further and play around with a bunch of stuff was very productive in terms of trying to understand what this car needs.”
The team’s pre-season clutch issues, said to have been experienced by some other squads, are now behind it, and were unrelated to a failure which compromised De Pasquale’s Symmons Plains weekend when he missed out on crucial practice time.
That drama with the clutch hub, a control part, is now being reviewed by the manufacturer.
“The part has gone to the manufacturer and we’re still awaiting some feedback from them on their analysis,” noted Croke.
The next event of the season is the Betr Darwin Triple Crown, on June 16-18.
