Motor Racing
Jason Bright discusses how he went in the 2014 V8Supercars championship.
In his words “it was a good year in some respects but certainly I didn’t feel like we did as good a job as I would expect”.
51Thoughts had the opportunity to catch up with Jason Bright to discuss how he felt he went in last year’s V8Supercars championship.
In his words “it was a good year in some respects but certainly I didn’t feel like we did as good a job as I would expect”. To elaborate a little Jason had an up and down year in 2014, he won one race at Pukekohe and was on the pace early in the year but felt that he was off the pace from Townsville which cost him a well-deserved top ten in the championship however he feels that “we have been pretty competitive since Phillip Island”.
As a fan, last year’s Bathurst race will go down as one of the most unusual races we have ever seen with the track breaking up. Jason agreed he said the track problems “caught quite a lot of guys out, it was very easy to make a mistake on a couple of parts of the track…. It did get very slippery off line (including around the dipper)”. Whilst it ended up more interesting for fans, unfortunately for Jason it was a race to forget, as he was out of contention early.
Moving forward to 2015, Jason key goal is to be more consistent in 2015 so he can be “battling for podiums, race wins and pole positions”. Over the off season at BJR (Brad Jones Racing) the team that is a stable organization with very good staff retention has made some structural changes to improve the team’s performance in the championship, by having a chief engineer oversee and monitor the performance of all three cars rather than each of the three cars running their own setups. Jason also feels that this will “help guide and keep each of us informed and that’s part of the thing that we have been missing.” He also believes that “as a team we have to be better at being consistent from track to track and not sort of falling off the pace during the middle period of the year.”
Before the V8Supercar season starts in Adelaide on the 26th of February with the legendary Clipsal 500, the field had a testing weekend at Sydney Motorsport Park (formerly known as Eastern Creek). Jason felt that even though the track surface was hot with temperatures above 60 degrees, he had a good weekend. “I felt we proved that we had pretty good pace…. at least we got a gauge out of the test the other day, where I feel like we are definably inside the top ten although we still have some areas that we need to improve in.”
Jason has been racing in the V8 Supercar series for eighteen years and feels that the series is more competitive now than when he first started. “There’s no-one doing a bad job anymore, all of the equipment that everyone is running is very good. Everyone’s got similar horsepower and all the drivers are pretty good.” However one rule that has irritated all drivers including Jason is the changes that the officials have made to the restarts in races. He thought the previous rules were “a bit of a disaster…. I think that they probably didn’t understand from the cockpit how difficult it is gaging those sort of things, trying to keep it below 60 km/h and we saw what it caused, several different incidents including my role there.” For the 2015 season V8 Supercars have gone back to the traditional rules of once you have passed the safety car you can resume racing.
This year’s championship will include some super sprint races which will be 60km’s in duration not 100km.The officials believe that it will improve the quality of racing however the question has to be asked, do drivers prefer short or long races? Jason reply’s “There has been some shorter races, they are constantly changing, hard to say what’s better. I like longer races; whether 100km is considered a long race anyway….. fuel wise, I think if the tyres aren’t a problem, you will see guys pit as early as possible”, and only pit again if they think the tyres won’t last the entire race.
Jason enjoys seafood so one event he looks forward to attending every year is the SKYCITY Triple Crown in Darwin held at Hidden Valley and after the event he commented that it’s a good chance to relax and do some fishing and catch some “Barramundi and JewFish”
