Nick Percat: BJR deal a ‘massive reset’

While his stint at LD Motorsport created two immense highlights for Percat – winning the Clipsal 500 a year ago and the finishing third at the Bathurst 1000 last October – the South Aussie has now settled into a more consistent environment with experience squad BJR.

And his first weekend with the team saw him bounce back towards the front of the field, with a seventh in Race 1 – despite an awkward clash with new teammate Tim Slade – before an unfortunate rub of the Turn 8 wall took him out of Sunday’s race on Lap 1 after he’d qualified sixth.

Percat chatted with Motorsport.com’s Andrew van Leeuwen about his return to a team capable of fighting at the front, the need to rebuild confidence after a tough couple of seasons, and that little run-in with Slade in Adelaide.

MOTORSPORT.COM: You looked pretty happy with yourself getting around the paddock in Adelaide. Settling in to the new gig well?

NICK PERCAT: The big thing is is the way the team has your back no matter what. I found that out on Sunday with the crash at the start. Even before that, every time I came in from a session the smile on everyone’s face was pretty cool to see.

It’s just the general team morale. My mechanics are pumped to be near the top of the times, and that makes me feel pretty good as a driver. Life is good there. It’s early days, but so far so good.

New team, new car – were you surprised to essentially be showing Top 10 pace all weekend?

I was definitely surprised, because the test day didn’t go completely smoothly for us.

I’ve spent two years battling it out in 15th-20th, so you start doubting yourself a little bit. But I definitely had confidence, because Brad has employed me to do the job there – and ever since I’ve signed they’ve said ‘we know you’re fast, we want to get you back to that 2012-13 level’.

To be on the pace from Practice 1 was nice, I obviously settled into the car quite quickly. Seventh was a solid result for Saturday, and to be comfortably in the Top 10 Shootout on Sunday was quite good. It would have been nice to finish Sunday’s race, just to get the laps in the car because it is different to anything I’ve driven before. Judging from Sladey’s speed from Saturday to Sunday, I think we would have been contenders to fight around where Chaz [Mostert] was.

So that’s disappointing, but I still woke up Monday with a smile on my face because it’s refreshing to know that the last two years haven’t been me, because I’ve jumped into a different car and gone back to the front.

This isn’t a fourth car, or a small team clinging to survival, you're a top driver in a good team. Does it feel like a new beginning, in terms of your career?

It feels like a massive reset. You and I have been talking since Walkinshaw Racing first signed me at the end of 2006, and that was a really good chapter for me. It got me into the scene, and without that happening none of it would have been possible.

The reason to go to BJR is to have equal equipment to the bloke alongside me, and I thought BJR was the best team to offer that. So it’s a massive reset. My number has changed for the first time in a long time, my helmet looks different, everything has changed. This is a new chapter in my career, and an opportunity to show what I can do.

Brad has had a lot of faith in that, the whole team has. From the moment I walked in to the factory in December you could feel they were pumped to see what I can do in one of their cars. It was a long wait, but after Friday in Adelaide they said ‘we knew you’d be fast, we’ve been hanging to get you in the car’.

This is definitely the best opportunity I’ve ever had, and that’s why I wanted to do a multi-year deal, because I feel like this is somewhere where I can grow. For me, it’s extremely positive.

How did you and Sladey deal with that little mishap on Saturday?

When it happened I thought to myself ‘you’ve got be kidding me!’. I don’t think the move was high risk at all, I just had no idea his mirror was broken, and he wasn’t expecting it because I’d come out of the pits on cold tyres. For whatever reason my thing was just hooked up on cold tyres, and I went around him at the next corner.

It was very awkward. I won’t lie, when I saw Brad [Jones] getting interviewed on the big screen I sunk into the seat a little bit.

When you’re in a good team like that, you win as a team and you lose as a team. To be involved in what affected two cars running in the Top 10 wasn’t ideal.

After the race I gave Sladey a couple of hours to look at it from his side, and he didn’t need me in there telling him what I thought happened. The good thing with him is that we’ve known each other a while, we get on well, so there’s no schoolyard games. Once he settled down he came up and said ‘I’m sorry, my mirror was broken and I didn’t see you’, and I said ‘I didn’t know your mirror was broken so I’m sorry too’. We went and got icecream and pressed on!

That’s the beauty of having someone like Sladey as your teammate, there’s no crap. As Brad said in an interview, this is car racing, these things can happen.

A bit of internal pressure from a teammate is probably something you haven’t had much of the last couple of years…

Yeah, exactly. The biggest thing with BJR is that we hoped that myself and Sladey would have a fairly similar style, and after qualifying on Sunday you could put the two overlays together and you couldn’t tell who was who.

As a group, we’ll be able to push forward a lot quicker than they’ve been able to do in the past. I think Jason Bright drove the car a fair bit differently to Sladey, and that made it harder to evolve setups. Already on the weekend, we rolled into qualifying on Sunday with identical cars. We both did a data overlay after the first set of tyres, and they said ‘you’re quicker here, here’s quicker there – if you brake a bit later at Turn 4 you’ll go a tenth faster’. You go out and do it, and the lap time comes. So already it’s been very positive.

I haven’t had a teammate for the last two years that’s pushed me enough, so you can get a little lazy. That’s the way it goes. Just being at a team where you come in and the first question they ask is ‘how do we make the car faster, how do we make you faster?’ is great. They go over all the little mistakes you make. Everyone from the team boss to the mechanics are pushing the same way.

It’s refreshing, and honestly, I’ve lacked it since probably 2008 or 2009. Ever since I got into Supercars, I’ve never had the same engineer for more than half a year.

For me, this is perfect.