Tim Edwards says the wet weather forecast for this weekend’s Repco Bathurst 1000 has put Tickford Racing’s plans “through the shredder”.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, rain is set to fall on all four days of track action at this year’s Mount Panorama enduro.
Bathurst has been a happy hunting ground for Tickford, with team boss, Edwards, suggesting the squad has a car good enough to win in the dry.
However, the wet weather necessitates a re-think, changing teams’ programmes.
Tickford has been the bridesmaids in the last two editions of the Bathurst 1000, with Cameron Waters and James Moffat finishing second to Chaz Mostert and Lee Holdsworth last year.
Waters, who is yet to win the Great Race, stated he is “sick of being asked about coming second”, aiming to put those conversations to bed with a victory in 2022.
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He will once again share the #6 Ford Mustang with Moffat.
“We don’t want [rain] because we came here to win this weekend,” Edwards told Speedcafe.com.
“In a straight fight on a dry track we’ve got a competitive car around here and we’re sick of finishing second to be frank.
“We’ve had a good step back, look at what we do, the way we set the car up, how we prepare, etc.
“We’ve come here with what we believe is a competitive package to try and get from two to one.
“Unfortunately when it’s wet it just throws all the balls in the air and it’s a very different scenario for everybody.
“You go from ‘I want to be fast down the straight’ to ‘holy shit I’ve got to put downforce on’ and ‘I’ve got to be fast across the top but want to be able to stop the car in the wet’.
“It’s just a completely different mindset so the engineers will all be sitting down re-drafting all of their plans; you’ve got six practice sessions and we knew what we were doing in every one of them.
“That plan has just gone through the shredder now so we’ll be re-jigging all of our practice plans to take into account that it’s a different track than what we were expecting.”
Like Waters, Edwards is also determined to put aside questions about coming second.
“The glum look on everybody’s face in here after this race last year told me that [Cam] wasn’t the only one pissed off he finished second, we all were pissed off,” added Edwards.
“Normally there’s a certain sense of euphoria to finish second — at Bathurst, win it or bin it.
“I don’t give a shit if he finishes second or 27th, if we’re not winning it doesn’t matter.”
Expanding on the wet weather, Edwards said: “If you’ve got a competitive car and a competitive driver, you’re competitive.
“We don’t expect to be not competitive but we certainly have an expectation that in a dry race [we would have been competitive].
“A wet track is very different, everybody goes out for first practice tomorrow a little green.
“We all know largely what we do in the wet, we change our cambers, we change the downforce, we soften the car but you are tackling a very different Mount Panorama than a dry track.”
Practice 1 at Bathurst kicks off at 11:00 AEDT on Thursday.
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