Jake Kostecki has attributed his recent turn of pace, including a maiden pole, to a sharper focus at Kostecki Brothers Racing (KBR) now that it is running one car in Super2.
KBR ran VF Commodores for Jake, his brother Kurt, and cousin Brodie last year, but slimmed to two entries when Kurt Kostecki took his car to Triple Eight Race Engineering for the 2019 Dunlop Super2 Series.
As of the last round at Townsville, it is now running only one car in the second tier as its other is converted to ZB specification for a wildcard campaign for Jake and Brodie in all three events of the Pirtek Enduro Cup.
KBR consists of a four-person workshop crew of the brothers, Brodie, and mechanic Andy Hackett, plus occasional support outside race weekends from engineer Jason Gray.
Jake Kostecki attributed his Townsville Armor All Pole Position and general step up in performance to the young team’s increasing experience with Supercars.
“I’ve always been confident in myself, but now that we’ve actually got a better package and evolved it around myself, this year I’ve been starting to show it a bit more,” he told Speedcafe.com.
“We’ve obviously only got the one car now in our series and last year we were running three cars; it’s a lot harder than running one car.
“We can rock up to the track with three cars, but it doesn’t mean they’re all going to be fast.
“Now that I’m pretty much the prime focus in our championship in Super2, it’s been a lot of help to me.
“For Kurt and I especially, this is our first car racing experience. We went pretty much go karts to this, so we jumped straight into it.
“We’re pretty much learning everything ourselves and it’s me, Kurt, and Brodie in the workshop; we’re setting up the cars, we’re doing it all.
“Now we’re focusing on some things that we need to work on, instead of taking three cars to the track and just getting them onto the track and just trying to finish the race.
“Now we’re trying to get to the track and not make the numbers up and actually get results.”
Kostecki suffered a driveline failure in Race 1 in Townsville and then finished seventh from pole in Race 2 when he made a second poor start in as many days.
The weekend was, however, still a source of pride given that KBR outqualified a number of fancied teams, including some which also operated in the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship.
“The round in Townsville actually went pretty good,” he stated.
“We still got a pole position over a lot of good teams there, a lot of main series teams, so that’s a positive to take out of it.
“We obviously didn’t get that good of a race, only finished seventh, couldn’t get it off the line. I need to work on that.
“I’ve had good starts throughout the year until I came up to that round and then just couldn’t get off the line. Had an issue in Race 1 and then Race 2 I just didn’t get off the line, but that’s how it goes, I guess.”
While Brodie was the driver to drop out of Super2 when a car was to be converted for the wildcard tilt in order to ensure Jake got more mileage, the team in general is also building towards the enduro events.
“There are many positives to take out of that weekend (Townsville),” declared Jake Kostecki.
“We learned a lot going and we’re starting to go into wildcard (entries) soon.
“We’re actually trying some stuff out in our Super2 program, obviously to help out our main series side. That’s been going well.”
Round 4 of Super2 starts today at the Century Batteries Ipswich SuperSprint with Practice 1 from 1005 local time/AEST.
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