Cameron Hill and his CHE Racing team are raring to get stuck into the Hi-Tec Oils Bathurst 6 Hour after burning the midnight oil through preparations.
Hill will combine with Tom Sargent for the production car enduro at Mount Panorama on Sunday.
The team snuck in a pair of shakedowns on its BMW M2 in the lead-up to the event, practice for which starts this morning.
“This car is pretty awesome. I jumped in for about 10 initial laps and I was pretty impressed straight away,” said Hill, who won the 2021 Porsche Carrera Cup Australia title and now competes for Triple Eight Race Engineering in the Super2 Series.
“We haven’t had a lot of time to develop it, but in the two days of testing, nothing went wrong.
“It has a lot of potential, so we are keen to turn our first laps at Mount Panorama and see what it’s got.
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“We are running a pretty off the shelf tune. The set-up is good, we got the car feeling a lot more drivable compared to when we first rolled it out.”
Entered in the top-tier Class X, Hill believes they can be a genuine contender for the win come race day.
“I feel like if we do everything right as a team, we have a good chance for outright victory,” he continued.
“It will be cool to find out how we are going to go against the other BMWs. We’ll just have to wait and see.
“My dad has been pulling big hours. My boys in the shop have been non-stop doing everything they can. We had an auto electrician also in the workshop doing our wiring.
“There’s been a big team of people who have really been pushing. A month or two ago, we committed and committed hard. To be able to turn a few laps in testing is better than what we had expected.
“Only a month ago, we were looking at it in the workshop and we were thinking, ‘Is this actually going to happen?’”
Sargent, the 2021 Australian Formula Ford champion, voiced his excitement about the opportunity – including teaming up with his mentor.
“We haven’t tested the BMW as much as we like due to time restrictions, so we’re just really hoping the car gets a run this weekend and gets some valuable laps. This will enable us to progress and understand a little bit more about it for next year,” he said.
“The colours of the livery will ensure the BMW will pop in the sun.
“It’ll be interesting to pair up with Cam. We have worked together during the past four to five years now with him developing my driver training, so it will be good to drive the same car together and bounce off each other.
“I’m really looking forward to that and hopefully we can have a strong weekend.”
The 6 Hour field will have two hour-long practice sessions today, the first of which starts at 10:05 AEST.
Live and ad-free coverage of the event will be available tomorrow and Sunday via Stan Sport.
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