In the third of a series of Speedcafe.com columns from within the 888 Mercedes-AMG Team Vodafone garage, Shane van Gisbergen offers his views after a challenging qualifying day at the Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour.
It’s been an interesting day and we worked through a lot of things, and tried a lot of different things. The car was okay but then in qualifying we just didn’t get the performance gain with the quali set-up on the car, but there’s a lot going on to make things better for the race tomorrow.
Jamie tuned the car up a lot in practice, and when I jumped in at the end it felt good. It’s interesting that the quali set-up didn’t work, but I’m sure when we go back to the race set-up that we came up with in practice it will be fine.
The plan is for me to start the race, which I’ll do from 19th. It’ll make for an early start and a long day, but we have the best team here and we understand the race and the strategy to hopefully move forward.
Normally I like to get up late, I hate mornings, so tomorrow is going to be tough. I tried everything I could to avoid starting the car but Roland locked me in!
Starting in the dark is always difficult because everyone goes flat out from the very start. Being down the field a little bit I think I’m going to try and back up everyone in my group to try and get some clear track. It’s a long race so there no point doing stupid stuff to try and get to the front. It’s better to get a feel for the track in the dark.
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We’ve got an okay race car so hopefully tomorrow we can ease our way into the race and move forward.
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