06 Nov STRONG FINISH IN NEW ZEALAND
Craig Lowndes finished his Supercar weekend in style at Pukekohe Park, New Zealand on the weekend with a strong fourth place in Race 24 of the Virgin Australia Supercar Championship.
In a highly-competitive run, Craig took the TeamVortex Commodore to within sight of the podium to cap off a successful weekend which also saw an aggressive recovery drive to eighth in Saturday’s championship race.
“It was a fantastic result to come out of here with a fourth position,” Craig Lowndes said.
“After the year we’ve had, it just shows that we haven’t given up the fight and (now) we’re really looking forward to finishing the year on a high.”
FRIDAY
- Craig 9th fastest in Practice 1
- Craig 9th fastest in Practice 2
“If you wind the clock back 12 months, this was Irish’s (John McGregor) first round as a Race Engineer. We come back here now 12 months later and the car’s really nice to drive. Our race-run (today) was good, very consistent. Whether it’s fast enough we won’t know until tomorrow, but the car itself is responding to everything we’re doing. I’m happy and comfortable in the car, we just need to find a couple of tenths to be right up at the pointy end of the 10, but it’s a fantastic result to have two top 10 finishes today.”
SATURDAY
- Qualifying washed out, grid position determined by culmination of Friday practice sessions
- Craig starts 9th
- Lap 10 clash costs positions, Craig recovers strongly
- Craig finishes 8th in Race 23
“It was a crazy day. I haven’t been involved in a cancelled qualifying session in such a long time, so I was thankful that we had a good practice the day before. We started 10th and got a good start. We got caught up in a little bit of drama early in the race as the track was drying out and I got turned around, but the car was good and we had a good recovery after falling to the back. We had good pace and passed a lot of people along the way. I’m thankful to the guys, they did a great strategy. The car was fast so I was able to climb back into eighth after a challenging start.”
SUNDAY
- Craig qualifies 12th for Race 24
- Craig finishes 4th in Race 23
“In qualifying we made a mistake at turns two and three and obviously everyone can see where we ended up, but thankfully we didn’t cause a red flag, which meant we started 12th. We had a good race car yesterday and we believed that today we could do the same. We made some adjustments, obviously the conditions on the day were much different to yesterday. I think we got the car 90 percent right, it was a very easy car to drive for that amount of laps. We had a great battle up the front for a long time, we had good pace to be able to pass other cars.”