21 May WINTON REPORT
Craig Lowndes took his Autobarn Lowndes Racing Commodore to a pair of solid finishes in the latest round of Supercar racing, at Winton Raceway in rural Victoria on the weekend.
In Saturday’s shorter Race 13 Craig turned a disappointing qualifying into a strong 13th placed finish and repeated the dose on Sunday in the longer Race 14, which was his 650th Championship race start, coming from the back again to finish one better in 12th.
“It was a good result for a day that could have been better, but we survived and we’re sitting third in the championship, so we go away from this weekend one spot closer to the top,” Craig Lowndes said.
Despite the frustrations of the Winton weekend, Craig is now placed third in the 2018 Virgin Australian Supercars Championship.
FRIDAY
- First session on wet track, dry track for session two
- Craig 11th fastest in Practice 1
- Craig 20th fastest in Practice 2
“We had a good car in the wet through practice one, we made good progress there, but then we had to start again for the second session, being dry. I think the car’s not bad to drive, we just need to find a bit more speed. The flow of the car, we’ve just got to get it to go better through turns seven, eight, nine. We’re not quite where we should be in the results in the sense of the speed of the car, I think we could have done a better job with that. It’s pretty tight at the top, but I think that we’ve got a good direction for tomorrow.”
SATURDAY
- Craig is 19th fastest in Practice 3
- Craig qualifies 24th for Race 13
- Craig finishes 13th for Race 13
“The car was much better for the race. We made a big change between qualifying and the race, and the car responded well to it. We weren’t sure exactly how the balance was and to be honest it wasn’t completely perfect, but it was a lot better than what we had in qualifying. Everyone has seen that we can bounce back, and our guys did a great job with that. It was good to have a car that was able to do that. Credit to everyone here, we’ll work overnight to improve it again tomorrow.”
SUNDAY
- Craig qualifies 23rd for Race 14
- Craig finishes 12th for Race 14
“My 650th was certainly memorable! We started off the day on the back foot. Qualifying didn’t quite go to plan, we had one lap at the end and I made a mistake at turn 11. I ran wide, and I potentially could have been around the 10th mark, which would have been much nicer for us. We worked pretty hard during the race, the strategy was good. The car pace wasn’t as nice as yesterday, so we made adjustments through both our stops and the car definitely got better through that. It’s great that our guys can do that on the fly. It definitely made an improvement to the car. We had a great battle at the end with Will (Davison) and we had to push hard on that last lap and managed to get by him for 12th position.”