Prodrive is hunting an unknown fault in the car Mark Winterbottom and Dean Canto are sharing this weekend after the Falcon pair struggled for pace in today’s second and third practice sessions.
Canto logged the second fastest time of the day during dry running in the opening session before the weather turned.
In his only session, Winterbottom was capable of just 15th before Canto ended the day at the bottom of the timesheets, more than three seconds adrift of Tony D’Alberto’s best effort at the other end of the table.
“The car was not good in the wet and then we somehow made it worse for Dean,” said Winterbottom.
“At the moment, our wet car is horrible but we’ve got team cars that are in the top three and doing it easy. There’s something going on.”
“They said there’s something on the data,” added Canto. “The car’s not right. Literally I turned the steering and the things going straight ahead at a slower pace than the car in front of me.”
Their concerns were confirmed by Prodrive team boss Tim Edwards, who admitted the squad was investigating the car’s lack of pace.
“There is something wrong with it, we have just got to find out what it is,” Edwards told Speedcafe.com.
“It has got chronic understeer.
“In first practice Dean was flying around but then we made a load of changes.
“We have just got to find out what we did and maybe we did something wrong, maybe something is broken.
“We will eliminate it by taking everything off of the car, and we do know the things we have changed over the course of the day.
“I’m sure it will be fine tomorrow.”
Prodrive’s other entries for Chaz Mostert/Steve Owen (fourth), Cameron Waters/Richie Stanaway (seventh) and Jason Bright/Garry Jacobson (11th) finished the day strongly in Practice 3.
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