PHILLIP ISLAND REPORT

PHILLIP ISLAND REPORT

Craig Lowndes took his Autobarn Lowndes Racing #888 Holden Commodore to a pair of strong top 10 finishes in races 9 and 10 of the 2018 Virgin Australia Supercar Championship at Phillip Island on the weekend.

At the ultra fast Victorian MotoGP track Craig qualified strongly on Saturday and ran among the leaders to finish fourth, while on Sunday he qualified outside the top 10 but drove a strong race to finish seventh.

“I’m delighted that we’ve moved up a couple of spots in the Championship, so we will keep racking up those points,” Craig Lowndes said.

FRIDAY

Craig is 4th fastest in Practice 1
Craig is 19th fastest in Practice 2

“It was a productive day, we had a good first practice, we worked through some different setup changes which the car responded to well. In practice two unfortunately I think we went a bit too far with the setup, which is good to know now. We will work on it and go through the data in Debrief. Overall, we’ve learnt a lot today, I’m happy where we are at and looking forward to tomorrow.”

SATURDAY

  • Craig qualifies 4th for Race 9
  • Craig finishes 4th for Race 9

“We had to start from the base in Qualifying as we didn’t quite maximise the practice sessions on Friday. We opted to go back to what we knew and made adjustments after the first run, which improved the car. We made a further adjustment for the third run and the car was then at its best. The start wasn’t great, I had too much clutch slip so I didn’t get the drive off the line. We struggled at the beginning of the race with pace, (but) we made an adjustment through the first pit stop which made the car better. On the last stop we made another change and the car was super-fast. We had a really strong car at the end of the race, credit to everyone.”

SUNDAY

  • Craig qualifies 13th for Race 10
  • Craig finishes 7th for Race 10

“Qualifying didn’t quite go to plan, we were hoping to be further up the grid; the conditions changed and I think all three of our (team) cars suffered a little bit (from lack) of pace. Knowing what race car we had yesterday we were hoping to come back through during this afternoon’s race, which we did. The team had a great strategy and there were some fantastic calls. The safety car came at the right time for us but stopping early made the last stint quite long. Our tyre life was great but we just didn’t have enough at the end to hold Shane (van Gisbergen) off.”