IRWIN Racing Sandown Friday report

TOP FIVE FOR IRWIN RACING AT SANDOWN

#4 Irwin Racing: Alex Davison

Photo by: Chris Von Wieldt

IRWIN Racing has made a near perfect start to this weekend’s Norton 360 Sandown Challenge at Sandown Raceway posting the fifth fastest time.

It was a good day of development for IRWIN Racing. In its first session it was in a lowly 22nd place, struggling with balance, but after some changes Alex Davison was able to improve his best time by more than seven-10ths of a second, rocketing him up into the top five.

If it was a strong start for IRWIN Racing, it was even better for Stone Brothers Racing which had all three of its cars in the top five for practice with Tim Slade finishing second, Shane van Gisbergen fourth and Davison in fifth.

After experiencing extreme heat at the track today, temperatures in Melbourne will drop over night, with rain expected tomorrow. This will make qualifying and the first race of the weekend a lot more challenging.

At Sandown Raceway tomorrow, qualifying begins at 11.15am followed by the race 4.05pm.

What IRWIN Racing’s Alex Davison had to say:

“Fifth place is reasonably good. I was pretty unhappy with the IRWIN Ford at the start of practice, it wasn’t competitive at all. After some work, it ended up being quite a good car at the end of practice. We've not always been able to recover like that so that’s clearly good work from everyone. (Tim) Slade was competitive from the outset, we worked as a team, took some of the settings from him and it helped us. It was a similar situation for car nine. We’ve got a little bit more to go, but it’s pleasing to recover after a difficult start.”

What IRWIN Racing’s engineer Dan Kroehn had to say:

“We are very happy with fifth position today. We had a few little chassis imbalances that we had to work through after the first session, so we sat down and worked on a plan for the second session and made progress in exactly the right places. Fifth is good, we're a couple of tenths off first so we're still looking for a bit more speed tonight. We'll knuckle down and see if we can find some extra time that will qualify us on the first couple of rows of the grid for tomorrow's race.”