Virgin Supercar Championship Australia preview with Holdens David Reynolds from Erebus Motorsport

Virgin Supercar Championship Australia preview with Holdens David Reynolds from Erebus Motorsport

David Reynolds finished last year’s Virgin Supercar Championship in 16^th place, with the one podium, where he finished 3^rd. His best qualifying was 4^th place in the last race of the year, in the final race at Sydney Motorsport Park. David will be joined by Dale Wood from Nissan Motorsport for the seaon and has been paired with the experienced Luke Youlden for the Pirtek Endurance Cup later in the year.

The first round is in Adelaide on the 2^nd to 5^th of March with 2x250kms races and here are his thoughts on the year ahead.

1. How would you rate the 2016 season?

The 2016 season was good towards the end as we had a good run but at the start of the year, we were such a new team everyone was so new at their job. Most of the team including mechanics had never been a part of supercars for their entire life. We had made a lot of mistakes early but everyone learnt and we had good guidance from team manager Barry Ryan, who’s very well experienced. We got a very bright engineer by the name of Alistair McVean who brought a whole new level of experience to the table

2. What are your expectations for 2017?

Last year we finished 16^th in the championship with one podium, if I can finish inside the top 5 in the championship with a few podiums and a few poles. I think that we have had a fantastic year.

3. Is there anything you can take from your performances last year and bring into this year?

Kind of but every weekend slightly different as the track, the circumstances and weather are different. This year the tyres are different as well which is going to play a new card to everyone as well. It’s going to be a challenging year.

4. Your new car for 2017, How long did it take for a car to be made and are you running two new cars as well?

No, we just have one car and generally all up they say its 1000 man hours from construction to roll cage to floor pan and everything to its basically completed. It’s a lot of work hours really.

5. How do you think you went at Sydney Motorsport park test day?

It was ok, that track is fundamentally a difficult track just to set your car up, the track goes away a lot during the day. There’s about ten different surfaces out there so it’s hard to adjust your car and quantify where you are going forwards or backwards. It’s just one of those days where you just make sure that the car works ok, it’s not horribly wrong, its braking ok, belts are not so bad and you just kind of have to tick the box really, it’s not really indicative of car performance I don’t think.

6. In terms of the ten different surfaces what do you mean by that? Is it the fact of temperature changes through the day?

Nah, they have redone the surfaces indifferent parts over different times of the year, over different years. So, there are probably seven to ten different types of surfaces to erode and degrade over time. Turn one is old, turn two was new a couple of years ago, turn three was new a couple of years ago, and turn four was new about two years ago. They degrade over time and they have done it in patches as well rather than doing the whole track at once.

7. Are there any problems that came out of that test day that you need to work on for Adelaide?

Yeah definitely so our braking consistency wasn’t up to scratch it could be due to something small like a bad balance bar or a sticking feeling in the brake master cylinder or something like that. The boys have got to have a look at it and rectify the situation. It’s just small things because they built the car they didn’t have time to put the ducts in so it was really hot. We had to realign the seats and pedals so I could sit more comfortably and small stuff like that.

8. You mentioned there about the brakes, are they difficult things to fix or can they be fixed straight away?

Yeah definitely, so when we first built the car of the future when I was at ProDrive Racing, the first six months of that year were horrible for me because it took six months to work out what was going wrong as I couldn’t qualify and break the car at all. It turned out that it was the pedal box wasn’t installed properly so under brakes, when I put my foot on the brakes it was dragging about 30 turns of bias towards the front so it was locking front bars which hurt the front tyres. IT literally took them six months for them to work it out and I had no results in those six months and they probably wanted to sack me. It wasn’t my fault it was the car as it wasn’t doing its job.

9. How big of a change do you think it will be moving to a different compound of tyre?

Well, initially it’s supposed to be a lot different but if you read everyone’s comments and speak to drivers down pit lane and my own thoughts on it was that it wasn’t a lot different you’re just going a bit faster. Each tyre compound is about a second quicker than the predeceasing compound

10. What do you think of the series structure and Adelaide changing back to 2x250km races?

I prefer that because last year at Adelaide they had two wins and they only celebrated one and that was it the last race of the day. So, it has now gone back to one winner Saturday and one winner on Sunday and it means a lot more to win a race rather than to win a race each day.

11. Are you looking forward to going to Pukekohe and having furl stops year?

It doesn’t bother me as I like that track and I like the atmosphere. I don’t mind it as it adds another element itself.

12. With having Luke Youlden as your co-driver for the endurance racers is he taller than you?

Yeah, a little bit taller but he is quite solid and I think he has been to the gym a lot in life. It’s going to be hard to make a seat as he must make a seat and I will put a seat inside his seat so we are both kind of comfortable. Then you have the problems with the belts.

13. How would you fix that problem with the belts? Do you use extenders?

You can shorten or lengthen them during a stop, you can run two different belts or there are heaps of different ways.

14. Running two different belts would be quiet uncomfortable wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it can be that’s why it’s best to try and match yourself up with someone who’s the same size and weight as you.