James Golding and Richie Stanaway are 16th and 20th in the championship respectively ahead of the Endurance Cup, while the team mulls a possible double driver change for 2026.
Lacroix said following the opening rounds that the team would look to deviate from the Triple Eight customer playbook, putting an emphasis on tailoring the cars to its drivers.
PremiAir endured a mid-season slump, including a poor showing on a Hidden Valley circuit where it had shone in 2024, and has now resolved to sticking to the Triple Eight way.
Responding to fan criticism over the team’s performances this year, Lacroix explained the “fine line” of whether to stick to the script or head in its own direction.
“We try the hardest for the driver we have got, and we try a certain path,” Lacroix said in a team video after Ipswich, where PremiAir chalked up its first top 10 finishes since May.
“At this stage, the path we’ve chosen following the start of the year is to try and keep close to the guys, who are winning races, week in, week out – [Broc] Feeney or [Will] Brown.
“We know what they do, we know what they use, we see their data.
“I know all the drivers are not the same and some needs a little tweak here and there. We allow flexibility. But at this stage we are not ready to [stray from that].”
Golding and Stanaway’s cars are being run by young engineers Simon Hodge and Andrew Gilliam – the latter taking the reins from Lacroix at Hidden Valley in June.
Lacroix likened the challenge of chasing the team’s own set ups to parenting.
“It’s a bit like your kid walking on his own. If you do it too early, he’s going to keep crashing and not want to walk,” he continued.
“If you give too much hand, he’s going to be reassured all the time and when you take your hands off, he’s going to crash.
“It’s a very fine line to say, ‘can you go on your own and do your own set up?’.
“We see it earlier on this year. In Darwin we were nowhere. Last year [in Darwin] we were superstars, for what PremiAir is.
“I promise you we think a lot about it, and we are not trying to frustrate the driver. We are trying together to find the best way forward to learn how to race these cars.”
PremiAir is not the only team facing this balance, with fellow Triple Eight customers Matt Stone Racing and Brad Jones Racing also having access to data from the Red Bull Ampol Camaros.
Drivers from all three teams have commented that bolting in the Triple Eight settings doesn’t directly translate to front-running speed, while even Brown has struggled to match Feeney this year.
Lacroix said sticking to the information supplied by Triple Eight essentially removes a variable, noting restricted tyres and testing hamper efforts to branch out.
“When you’ve got somebody next to you who is putting five tenths on you and you can see where it is through the corner, the first thing we need to do is be honest with ourselves and say, ‘what did we miss?’” he added.
“It wasn’t the set up because obviously we are very close in set up, so what is it that we are not doing right to allow that?
“If I change the set up every session to try and find gold, it’s not going to happen. We haven’t got enough tyre, we haven’t got enough time on track, we haven’t got enough test days to do that.
“The last test day we did [at Queensland Raceway] was mainly co-driver, making sure they do a good job in the enduros.
“It’s not like we could go out there with three or four sets of green tyres for Richie to find a new way of driving the car. We don’t have that flexibility. It doesn’t exist.
“So, within the constraints of having the tyres and time to test, we need to work on the element we can and some of these are not to transform the car into something different.
“Unfortunately, this is not the time to do that. We need to stay close, clever [and make a] little change, little adaptation for each driver.
“But as long as our friends at Triple Eight are that fast, we need to understand how they do it before we try to find a different way to do it.”
PremiAir has been a customer of Triple Eight since the team was formed in 2022. The association will end next year when the latter squad switches to Ford.
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