Lee Holdsworth battles for another tough result in the top end

Surely after 3 consecutive horror rounds for Lee Holdsworth and the Garry Rogers Motorsport (GRM)Team it is time for some well earned results!

Well it wasn't to be at the Darwin round for GRM for the 5th round of the V8 Supercar Championship Series.

Before heading to Darwin we received the long awaited Walkinshaw Racing engine. This meant that I would have the same specification engine as the Holden Racing Team and several other teams in the Holden camp. Darwin was also was the first round for the recently manufactured controlled tyre which would prove to place major hurdles for our team at Hidden Valley Raceway.

In saying that, practice started well finishing up 3rd overall and just 4 hundredths of a second from the fastest time of Mark Winterbottom.

Track conditions changed for qualifying on Saturday morning which saw us struggle to make the top 10. After sorting out a setup for the track conditions I qualified 8th. We felt that we had a consistent package although we hadn't tried running long to test our race pace, which was a costly mistake for our weekend.

Race 1 was the start of a tough battle that would remain throughout all 3 races. Feeling confident after qualifying and practice we decided to leave the car very similar to run race 1. After a clean start I pitted early to avoid getting held up by drivers racing for position in front of me. Unfortunately, during my pit stop we had a wheel gun failure which caused us a loss of over 4 seconds and several positions. We finished the race in 13th.

For race 2 we made several changes to help conserve the rear tyres for a longer run. Our bad luck continued when I was on the receiving end of the contact between Todd Kelly and Steven Johnson into turn 1 of the first lap sending me off the circuit and back to 30th. I worked my way back up to finish 18th for the race.

Struggling for grip we opted to go for a major setup change for race 3 that would see our grip level go from bad to worse. I ended up finishing 16th in this race and 15th overall and came out of the round sitting 9th in the championship standings.

Overall this round demonstrated to us that we have some work to do in sorting out a new setup window for the new tyre compound to suit the car for the race. Some teams got on top of the tyre change and some didn't.

In the end, it's the same old story, it makes it very difficult to compete with teams that have an endless budget to conduct simulation tests of the new tyre compound while the lower teams have to continue to battle on with trial and error on the race track!

The next round is Queensland Raceway where our cars generally perform very well. I am looking forward to getting out of cold Melbourne and back into the sunshine state to redeem some points to climb back up the championship ladder.