With the Repco Supercars Championship on an extended break, Anton De Pasquale returns for a special edition of his The Distiller column, presented by Dasher + Fisher, to discuss the upcoming Eseries and what he’s been up to.

I’m not going to lie, being away from the race track for months on end isn’t exactly ideal.

The first couple of weeks was alright to recharge, but that novelty wears off pretty fast when you can’t go home to Victoria and visit family and friends.

We will at least get a bit of a racing fix the next six weeks with the Supercars Eseries starting tonight.

Of course, it’s never going to be as good as the real thing, but I think last year proved sim racing can be a handy substitute.

Personally, I would have preferred more road circuits – our cars and ovals don’t really go too well together. We kind of saw last year when cars touch, nine times out of 10 you’re going to crash… and if someone crashes, you’re all crashing.

There’s less aero wash effect on iRacing compared to the real-world car, so that does at least allow you to race close and slipstream so there should be plenty of passing at Charlotte tonight and the other ovals we’ll go to.

The timing has worked out perfectly because it was only a week or two before the Eseries was announced that my sim was shipped up from Melbourne to here on the Gold Coast.

It’s a good opportunity also to get the Shell V-Power Racing Team back in action and to hopefully give fans some entertainment.

Beyond the Eseries, I’ve been trying to make the most of the break by getting stuck into training.

Usually I’m pretty into my cycling but I tend to put the bike away at this time of the year because of magpies swooping.

It was more so bad back at the farm in Melbourne where it’s one way in and one way out and there’d be about four magpies on that road.

Instead, I’m trying to improve my running.

I’ve never really been much of a runner but as with everyone in our team, I’ve signed up for The Long Run charity event to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer – so it’s 72km for the month of September, run or walk – and I’m using that as my motivation.

I’ve also got my hands on a go-kart so I’m in the process of building that up, which is something I wanted to do anyway.

I’ve always enjoyed my go-karting and always done the enduro at the end of the year with Dave Sera and stuff like that, so it’s a good opportunity.

Brodie [Kostecki] has got one too – we have got the same thing so we’re building them up now and we’ll head to Ipswich and muck around once that’s done.

While there’s not a lot of racing going on in Australia, there is plenty to watch overseas.

I keep a close eye on IndyCar with Scotty [McLaughlin] being a good mate and I actually had a former team-mate win in Le Mans on the weekend – Ferdinand Habsburg winning the LMP2 class. We were team-mates in my first year in Europe (2014) in Formula Renault 1.6.

I did get to go watch the Excel enduro on Sunday at QR. It was good to see Broc [Feeney] and Nash [Morris] go well there and get the win.

As for our own Supercars calendar, I guess I’m not one to spend too much time thinking about things out of my control.

We’ve got good people in the category, good people in our teams whose responsibility it is to be working all that out.

It’s easy to be negative and bring yourself down and get stuck in that loop of what COVID has created, so I try not to waste too much mental energy on that.

Ultimately I’m pretty optimistic of getting the season going again – we’ve been able to do it before, we’ll find a way.

The one possible thing that could come out of the break now is then we have kind of an action-packed end to the year, which I think will make up for it.

Anyway, tune in tonight and hope to see you all at a race track sometime soon!

Anton