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That’s the vibe from inside the WAU camp ahead of opening practice on Friday afternoon at Symmons Plains.
Mostert has roared into title contention with four straight podium finishes, including a double victory last time out in Sydney that lifted the Ford star to second in the standings, 105 behind leader Will Brown.
However, Symmons Plains marks a return to the super soft compound rubber last used at Hidden Valley in June, where both Mostert and teammate Ryan Wood struggled.
The super soft is being deployed at Symmons Plains and the following Sandown 500, before Bathurst (hard tyre), the Gold Coast and Adelaide (both soft tyre) complete the season.
“We’re coming into this round with a little bit of trepidation,” WAU CEO Bruce Stewart admitted on the Repco Rundown.
“It’s been really widely publicised that the Super Soft has been a little bit of our bugbear.
“We did have a rookie test (for Wood) at Tailem Bend, everything that you learn there you’re hoping you can put into play in Tasmania.
“You never really feel comfortable until you go through Friday practice and that hour will be pretty important, and then once you get into qualifying you understand what you’ve got.
“But we’ve got a fantastic team, really intelligent guys and girls, who’ve put in a huge amount of work from SMP to Tasmania and it’s because we knew we had this hurdle, this big hump of the Super Soft tyre.
“We were pretty disappointing in Darwin, and Sandown last year. We’ve got a point to prove. We won’t really talk about championship hunt until you can jump a really significant hurdle that has hurt us before.”
Mostert noted that today’s practice plan is geared around sense-checking the team has conquered its Dunlop demons.
“We put a lot of emphasis on why we struggled at Darwin, how we could do something better and we’ve programmed everything today to see if we’ve done that,” he said.
“Different conditions here as well, obviously a lot colder here than what Darwin was, but I still think the same car-to-car characteristics will carry over if we did the same things.”
Asked if this round is crucial to his hopes of taking a maiden Supercars title, Mostert added: “100 percent. This round’s crucial, the next round (Sandown) is crucial on the same tyre…
“Any time, any race, is super-crucial at the moment to see if we can achieve what we want to achieve.
“But we’re just focused, being aggressive, making sure we do every nut and bolt in different configurations to keep learning.
“Last year, Gen3 was a bit of a tricky one for us, we didn’t get a lot of data, but this year has been fantastic.
“On one side of things I was so happy that we had this opportunity to come back here with the Super Soft because, watching the team in the background, how hard they worked to make sure we came back this weekend better than where we were in Darwin, it’ll be so rewarding if we can turn it around.
“We’ll put emphasis on this weekend as probably the most crucial part of the year for us.”
