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Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner believes he can close the gap to Anton De Pasquale with some driving tweaks after Dick Johnson Racing went one-two in Practice 1 at Pukekohe.
The #11 Shell V-Power Racing Team entry ended the opening session of Supercars’ ITM Auckland SuperSprint weekend almost a quarter of a second up even on the sister #17 Mustang of Will Davison, while Heimgartner was third at 0.2797s off the ultimate pace in his R&J Batteries ZB Commodore.
De Pasquale’s fastest lap of 1:02.2066s was comprised of the fastest splits of the session in each of the three sectors at Pukekohe Park Raceway, with around half of Heimgartner’s deficit over the course of the lap, 0.1461s, coming in the final intermediate alone.
Most of that was apparently down to missing the apex at the quick final corner, which the #8 pilot believes he can dial out of himself overnight.
“I just took a wide berth all the way around the last corner,” admitted Heimgartner.
“I’m not scared of the apex,” he laughed, “but it’s just one of those things when you’re trying to tune a car for different areas and stuff…
“It’s driving styles and those little things that you need to work on tonight.”
Heimgartner is currently 10th in the championship after a strong run through Wanneroo, Winton Hidden Valley, and Townsville, then also The Bend until he was a somewhat unfortunate victim of the big startline shunt when Thomas Randle stalled.
His fortunes last time out at Sandown reversed somewhat, with results of 23rd, sixth, and 13th at the Melbourne track, after a dozen top 10s in as many races immediately prior to the incident in South Australia.
Part of that was due to a penalty for contact with Broc Feeney in the opening race of the weekend, but starting 14th for the latter Sunday encounter hardly helped his cause.
The New Zealander identified qualifying as key at Pukekohe.
“Throughout this year, we’ve obviously got podiums, and potentially wins if certain things went certain ways, but we just haven’t been able to keep up with obviously [the Dick Johnson Racing] guys or Shane [van Gisbergen, championship leader],” he said.
“We’ve been working pretty hard on the race pace and I think we made some good gains at Sandown and we just reversed that and couldn’t qualify there.
“So, I think this weekend, if we can qualify right, we have the tools to make, hopefully, a good race car, and you never know what can happen.
“But you can never sort of predict what you’re going to do because everyone’s just trying so hard, especially at the front, and it’s never, never easy.”
Practice 2 for the Repco Supercars Championship field, another half-hour session, starts tomorrow at 11:35 local time/09:35 AEST.
