Anton De Pasquale mastered the challenging conditions that welcomed Supercars teams and drivers to Round 1 of the new season to collect a double podium result. His only real drama? A post-race crash. The Shell V-Power Racing Team star reflects on the Sydney SuperNight in the latest edition of his The Distiller column, presented by Dasher + Fisher.

Round 1 is in the books and we walked away from Sydney Motorsport Park pretty happy with our weekend.

As we’ve almost come to expect at SMP lately, the weather threw a heap of curveballs for Ludo and me and everyone to navigate.

Being on-off all three days, it’s much more stressful than if it’s just wet the whole time.

There’s so many things you can do with the car to make it a better wet car but then it’s going to hurt the dry car if the weather changes again, so you have got to have something that ticks both boxes.

And with a fair bit on the line in the races, it can easily go very wrong when things are changing so much, so to come out of it with a good haul of points is nice.

We probably had the chance to win at some point in either race, but the way things panned out, we had to settle for a second and third.

With Will also having a decent weekend, it puts the Shell V-Power Racing Team on top of the teams’ championship which is awesome.

Another good sign is our car was fast, as was showed in Practice 1 and getting pole position for Race 1.

Funnily enough, I’ve had more comments about my other Top 10 Shootout lap, on the Sunday, where I didn’t get pole (second behind Brodie Kostecki).

I knew what lap Brodie did because Ludo let me know on the radio and then I’m cruising around on the out-lap and it’s spitting a bit before I rolled out of pit lane, and as I got to Turn 3-4, it started raining quite heavy so I was like, this isn’t ideal.

I just tipped it into 1 and hoped for the best and came out the other side.

It was probably a little bit wetter than what I accounted for through 7 and 8 which is where I dropped a bunch of time, but it was full commitment in the wet. It was a fun lap.

To have the three Norwell guys – Brodie, me and Broc – qualify top four probably goes to show that it’s a programme that makes sense. We’ve done countless shootouts together and often in those changeable kind of conditions.

Unfortunately, in a way, my biggest mistake was after all the racing laps were done.

I was just having a bit of fun with Brodie on the in-lap and stuffed up. You feel like an idiot. I apologised to the team but yeah, we’ll move on from that.

Anyway, it looks like it should be an entertaining year. There’s probably more competitors that can vie for that championship than what I think we have seen for a fair few years so it’s going to be interesting.

Next up is Tassie. It’s 12 months since we have been there so we will see how we roll out and how good our package.

I think it will be better than what we had, but at the same time I think a few of the competitors will also have something a little bit better just with things that happened last year.

So it’s going to be interesting, we’ll go out there and give it our all and see what we come out with.

Anton

P.s. Thinking of everyone around Queensland and New South Wales who have been affected by the floods.