Having won the opening Repco Supercars Championship race of the Bosch Power Tools Perth SuperSprint on Saturday and surviving a race result protest from second placed Brodie Kostecki’s Erebos Motorsport Team on Sunday morning, Shan van Gisbergen was on the back foot after a poor qualifying for both Sunday’s races. Finishing fifth and 12th in the two sprint races, Van Gisbergen remains third overall on the points table but has slipped further behind Kostecki with Chaz Mostert in second.
“I thought going into today’s race that finishing in the top 15 after qualifying 21st would be a good result as it’s quite hard to pass and move through the field and a few people got spun out, but looking at the positives we had limited damage from that race from where we were.
“We’re still third in the championship points but we’ve slipped back a bit, and we lost a bit of a gap in the teams’ championship which is a shame from my end, so overall we need to be better.”
“In the first (Sunday qualifying) session we did change the setup overnight to get more turn,” commented van Gisbergen’s engineer. “It didn’t work so we went back to yesterday’s (Saturday) set up and we had massive understeer. We just didn’t get it right at the end of the day. We are still trying to understand the car and how to change it.”
“We now look towards Tassie which is a track where we’ve had a lot of success in the past so I’m looking forward to it,” said van Gisbergen.
“I’ve got some work to do on my side to get better before we get there. There are other teams in the field faster than us and doing a good job – winning races is good but we’re a bit inconsistent with both of our cars on the qualifying end, but that’s part of the fact-finding process with these new cars.”
Van Gisbergen’s team mate Broc Feeney won Sunday’s finale (Race 9) from pole and sits fifth overall in the championship, while Will Brown won Race 8 and is fourth overall.
The 2023 Repco Supercars Championship will resume at Symmons Plains Raceway, Tasmania, on May 19-21.
Race 9 highlights
Overall Points (Top 5)
1/ Brodie Kostecki 784
2/ Chaz Mostert 684
3/ Shane van Gisbergen 648
4/ Will Brown 613
5/ Broc Feeney 564
12/ Matthew Payne 405
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