The two-time Bathurst 1000 winner was uncompetitive from the outset in Tasmania, ending the respective Friday practice sessions 17th and 23rd fastest.
While practice is not always a form guide for the weekend, it proved the case here as Saturday yielded 19th and 12th in qualifying, which turned into 14th and 19th in the races.
On Sunday morning there was the embarrassment of qualifying on the last row of the grid, before a troubled race – including a penalty – resulted in an 18th place finish, off the lead lap.
Adding to the shock of the poor performance was the speed of teammate Ryan Wood, who outperformed Mostert in all bar one of the eight track sessions.
“We did a lot of changes, really trying to chase the performance in the car, but for me driving it, I could never get the maximum out of it,” Mostert told Speedcafe.
“That hardest part was it was very easy to overdrive the car and make it slower, and very easy to underdrive. I could never find the rhythm to get the lap time out of it.
“Really for me and the #25 car, we just really struggled with our lock margin in the front.
“I couldn’t attack the apexes with trail brake and everything we did set-up wise to make that better never really touched that phase of the corner.”
Mostert noted that the team threw several “Hail Mary” set-up changes at the car in the hope of improvement, with only the Sunday race providing a glimmer of hope.
“There were points of the weekend where we made ourselves a little bit worse,” he said.
“In the last race we tried some different stuff that we normally wouldn’t try. We still had a few little same issues that were there, but something interesting for us [to take away].
It’s likely that the Symmons struggle was a one-off for Mostert, just as a troubled Taupo proved for Triple Eight which bounced back with two Tassie wins.
The other winner in Taupo, Matt Payne, was also off the pace for most of the Symmons weekend – outside the top 10 in every qualifying session – before a strategic masterstroke on Sunday.
While all that shows how competitive the series currently is, Mostert said the team won’t simply write-off the weekend without further analysis.
“This was probably the toughest round for every team,” surmised Mostert.
“The cars got back really late from New Zealand, we tried to prep them the best we could and for whatever reason we really struggled.
“The beautiful thing is now we’ve got Perth, a happy hunting ground for us last year.
“We’ve also got time to go through things and understand, because I just didn’t feel competitive this weekend.”
Mostert’s remains fifth in the championship, although his deficit to the lead ballooned from 86 to 250 points and he’s now just 105 points ahead of the 10th place Finals cut-off.
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