Erebus Motorsport CEO Barry Ryan is eyeing the NTI Townsville 500 as a “reset” – but with a headstart in the Supercars championship.
The previous event of the season, the Betr Darwin Triple Crown, was the first of the 2023 Repco Supercars Championship in which neither Brodie Kostecki nor Will Brown scored a podium finish.
For Kostecki in particular, it would be a weekend of damage limitation given he scrounged 18 points from finishing last in Race 15, the Hidden Valley finale, having picked up early damage in a clash with Anton De Pasquale which was deemed a racing incident.
Brown, too, was forced to fight for his points haul, driving to seventh in Race 13 from 19th on the starting grid after being impeded by James Golding in the corresponding qualifying session.
However, they remain the top two in the drivers’ championship, and Erebus thus top of the teams’ championship.
“It’s just one of those weekends where we just didn’t get everything right and when you don’t qualify so good, you can get involved in incidents,” Ryan told Speedcafe.
“We had qualifying pace in every session; we just didn’t quite get it right. It shows that it’s a bit of a driver’s car.
“When you come to a track like [Hidden Valley] and you make a little error, you can easily end up 23rd and in the next session, you can end up pole.
“You’ve got to be up front to win, that’s what everybody’s proven; you can start on pole and get a really good start and you’re going to win.
“But we still leave here leading the championship – both championships – and we’re one-two in the championship.
“We just look at it that we’ve got to reset and go to Townsville with a head start.
“We start the championship right now and we start with a clean slate and a head start for the rest of year, so that’s best way to look at it, I think.”
Kostecki missed progression to the final segment of the knockout qualifying session which decided the grid for Race 13 of the season by 0.0168s
Thereafter, neither he nor Brown were any more than 0.2010s away from pole position.
However, in a field covered by less than seven tenths of a second in each of the Sunday qualifying sessions, that still meant a starting berth as low as 11th for Races 14 and 15.
“Our cars weren’t slow; we just didn’t qualify as well as we should’ve and, if you spoke to the drivers, I’d say they just didn’t get the most out of the car,” noted Ryan.
“Will qualified 19th [for Race 13] because he got baulked and Golding got a penalty. You can’t miss that one lap around here and once you miss it, you’re going to qualify bad, and he still raced back up to fifth or whatever it was.
“Pit stops, I think we were top five in each race, so it’s all still there. We just didn’t put it together [in Darwin].”
Kostecki left Darwin with finishes of fourth, fourth, and 26th, while Brown’s were seventh, fifth, and officially sixth, crossing the line fourth in the latter before a time penalty was applied for contact with Mark Winterbottom.
In the drivers’ championship, Kostecki leads Brown by 59 points, with Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Broc Feeney a further 32 back in third place.
Practice at the NTI Townsville 500 takes place on Friday, July 7.
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