News

Jul 5, 2016

Walleeee’s words on Darwin

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Porsche Carrera Cup Australia Round 4

“Darwin Simply put – it was an awesome round!”

 

The wall Racing team and I went there feeling reasonably positive knowing that we had the advantage of having raced there more recently than others we were racing, and particularly as we had raced there in a Porsche previously.

For the team, it was the first time anyone had raced this generation Porsche at the track, so it was a more level playing field with it being a new track for all of the teams with this car.

The round got off to the best possible start, with us topping the times in first practice.

We changed things around in our practice sessions for this round – running the newest of our Michelin tyres in the first session. We did this to give us a good understanding of what we needed to do to get the most out of fresh rubber later in the weekend

In practice two we ran older tyres while those around us ran their new tyres. We were really happy with our pace in that session, and confident that we had made improvements. Overall we ended up with the second quickest time for the day.

We went a bit too far with the car set up in qualifying which was not ideal and we had to settle for 7th, but we pushed it back for race one and fought back to claim 2nd place.

The car felt really good though, and we were quietly confident going into race 2 – but this is an incredibly tough Championship and we were taking nothing for granted!

It worked out perfectly for us though – coming home to claim our first win for the team and for me this season! A huge amount of hard work has gone in to getting to this point and I am so happy to have been able to reward the team with this result. Hopefully they now think the long days and nights spent fine tuning the car to get it just how I wanted it have been worth it!

It was also really great to be able to give Wilson Security, Payce and Shannons Insurance a win as well – I would not be able to do this without their support! It was particularly nice to have been able to do it with a lot of them up there cheering me on, maybe they need to come to all of the rounds?!

We were able to come home in second place in the third and final race of the weekend, meaning we finished the weekend in second outright.

Aside from the results, which were obviously a highlight, one of the biggest positives is where we are with the car set up now.

We are sitting in 4th place in the Championship at the half way point and hopefully we can keep chipping away at it. I think there is still a bit more to find from the car so we will not be sitting back and taking it easy! It would be nice to pick up a few more race wins in the second half of the season.

Next up we return to Sydney Motorsport Park – our home track. We had a mixed weekend results wise last time we raced there at Rennsport, but there were plenty of positives so I think we are going into the round.

The round will be a combined round with the Carrera Cup Asia which will add a layer of complexity, but it is an exciting opportunity!