Bundaberg Red Racing’s Fabian Coulthard has made solid progress in today’s opening practice at the Clipsal 500, posting the seventh fastest time of the day and setting himself up with a good base to work from for qualifying tomorrow.
The 27 year old Kiwi is looking to bounce back from a tough start to the season with a strong result this weekend and he has started on the right foot.
Contesting all three practice sessions set aside for the V8 Supercars, Coulthard chipped away at his program, working closely with his engineer, Rob Starr, and moved the #24 Commodore into a competitive position. .
Determined to see where his car can be improved, Coulthard is confident there is still more speed to be found out of the Bundy Red car.
However, it was a disappointing end to the day for his younger team-mate, Andrew Thompson, who was forced to sit the final practice session out when the clutch slave cylinder failed on the #10 Bundy Red Commodore.
He was making consistent progress through the first two sessions, working on fine tuning the car setup and trying to find more speed. He was 23rd fastest by the end of the practice two but slipped back to 27th by the end of the day after parking his car only minutes into the final leg of practice.
Holden’s Jamie Whincup was the fastest man out on track today, with Shane Van Gisbergen second and Ford’s Paul Dumbrell third.
The Clipsal 500 continues tomorrow with qualifying, the top ten shootout and the first of two 250km races.
Fabian Coulthard - #24 Bundaberg Red Racing VE Commodore (Practice: 7th, 1:21.9641)
“Today has been a productive day. We were able to try a few different things and just see where we were compared to the rest of the field. In the Middle East, we had trouble with making a few changes and not really feeling the difference, but the car has been a lot more in the window and a lot more to my liking. We have made some adjustments to fine tune the car and each time we have been fortunate enough to move forward and improve our times as well. It is not quite fast enough just yet but we have a few things up our sleeve that we are yet to try so now it is just a case of choosing the right one.”
Andrew Thompson - #10 Bundaberg Red Racing VE Commodore (Practice: 27th, 1:23.4533)
“It was a little bit disappointing to finish the day that way actually. We stuck to our plan in the first two sessions and closely followed our adjustments. We made a few changes that were quite different to what we ran in the first two events and managed to assess that. We thought we had found what our overall package was going to be, but we didn’t quite get to run it in that last session. We had a clutch issue which prevented us from participating in practice 3 but we will come back stronger tomorrow and look to improve in qualifying.”
