Motor Racing
A quick chat with Tim Blanchard from Team CoolDrive Racing
51 Thoughts was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Tim Blanchard from Brad Jones Racing. We asked for his thoughts about his year so far, how he did at Pukekohe and his expectations for the next round at Newcastle
A quick chat with Tim Blanchard from Team CoolDrive Racing
51 Thoughts was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Tim Blanchard from Brad Jones Racing. We asked for his thoughts about his year so far, how he did at Pukekohe and his expectations for the next round at Newcastle
- How would you rate your season so far?
It has been a frustrating season so far. We started poorly and had a few big incidents within the team which set us back a bit. But we’ve developed the car and while we’re lacking in one area, we’ll have that fixed for next season. I’m confident about the steps we’ve made this year. The car will be strong next year.
- You mentioned incidents inside the team; have you sorted those out?
Yeah, we have. We have three straight cars here this weekend, but I feel like we don’t have any spares back at the workshop. Our development program has probably been fairly compromised, and we are further behind on that than we’d like. This year, we have probably spent more time building and repairing cars than developing parts, which is a bit of a shame. Still, I feel like we’ve had some good developments on the car this year and have a good direction to work on over the Christmas holidays.
- What sort of changes do you think you’ll be making towards next year?
Obviously, there will be changes with the new Holden coming in next year, so a new aerodynamics package. We have to do a lot of development with our engine package, so that’s a key area for us. Teams like Prodrive have emphasised that a lot this year; they’ve made some good gains and have been a lot stronger in the second half of the year. We need to focus on that over Christmas and hope that we have a better package going into Clipsal next year.
- How would you rate your Saturday performance at Pukekohe?
We had a few issues on Friday, and not qualifying yesterday made it a lot harder. Our car is quite strong in the wet, so if they hadn’t resurfaced the back straight and if they had allowed us to qualify in the wet, we would have had a strong day yesterday.
- With the surface change, was the feel different from what you were expecting coming into the track?
Yeah, it’s just like ice. You couldn’t even get to full throttle on the back straight, it was so slippery. If they hadn’t resurfaced the back straight, we wouldn’t have had a problem on Saturday. I think that the resurfacing should have been done at the start of the year, so it would have had six months to cure instead of us going straight out a few weeks afterward.
- What were your expectations going into the Sunday race?
We need to qualify a bit better, so qualify a bit further forward. It’s quite hard to pass around here because you have some very fast-flowing corners and when you’re behind someone, you lose a bit of front grip when you lose the downforce in the front of your car.
After qualifying a disappointing 24th for the Sunday race at Pukekohe, Tim made changes to the care and moved up eight places in the race finishing 16th. The Supercars series now moves to Newcastle for the last round of the year. With it being a new track no one knows what to expect but Tim is looking forward to racing on the new track with the “layout, turns, elevation changes ect will be really challenging but fun. Being a street circuit there is no room for error, so everyone will be pushing it as much as they can to find the limit, but not exceed it”
