IRWIN Racing heads to Ipswich 300

SATURDAY QUALIFYING THE KEY FOCUS FOR IRWIN RACING

#4 Irwin Racing: Alex Davison

Photo by: Chris Von Wieldt

At the halfway point of the V8 Supercars championship IRWIN Racing can look at itself and be pleased with its results compared to what it achieved last year.

In the 15 races that have been staged so far this season, IRWIN Racing has been one of the success stories, with seven top ten qualifying results and nine top 10 race results, including second place at Abu Dhabi. This compares to only seven top 10 qualifying and eight top ten race results in the previous two seasons of racing.

While the team has improved, the main focus has turned to Saturday qualifying as the majority of top 10 qualifying and race results have come in the Sunday races.

Alex Davison has a qualifying average of 11th and a race finish average of eighth on Sunday, while this dips to almost 18th and 15th place respectively on the Saturday. Davison is eager to improve his Saturday performances and be more consistant.

IRWIN Racing goes into this weekend's V8 round in Queensland feeling confident of a good result, thanks to a couple of strong test days at Queensland Raceway recently and the exclusive use of the faster, soft option tyre over the course of the event.

On softs, the IRWIN Tools backed Ford Falcon has an average qualifying position of eighth, where as on hard tyres it is 11 places lower.

Davison is coming off a strong fourth place at last month's Sucrogen Townsville 400 and sits ninth in the V8 Supercars championship.

The Coates Hire Ipswich 300, at Queensland Raceway, starts this Friday with four practice sessions, followed by two 22 lap back-to-back races on Saturday and a 200km race on Sunday.

What IRWIN Racing’s Alex Davison had to say:

“We really want to put on a good show at Queensland Raceway. We've dropped the bundle a bit in qualifying the last few rounds. We've sort of come to the track and struggled with the IRWIN Ford and been catching up all weekend. The aim for the next race is to try and come out the gate in practice with a good car that we can fine tune, we've had that at different stages during the year but haven’t been able to do it the last couple of races. That's were we need to be.”

What IRWIN Engineer Daniel Kroehn had to say:

“We’re feeling pretty good about this weekend’s event at Queensland Raceway, we had a pretty solid test day recently were we went through a comprehensive list of developments and reconfirmed some of the car set up direction and settings that we've worked on this year. We’ve gone through the data with a fine tooth comb and we're feeling confident that there are some developments that will help us over the course of the weekend. We spent the majority of the afternoon at the test day working on our overall soft tyre pace and specifically our soft tyre pace at Queensland. We also focussed on getting up to speed in time for Saturday qualifying. We’ve been very competitive on Sunday but fallen short of expectation on Saturday. We are looking to turn this around. We're looking forward to rolling a very competitive IRWIN Ford out of the truck on Friday morning.”