Prodrive Phillip Island set-up ‘like survivor’

Amid a slew of right-sided tyre failures during Saturday’s race PRA was worst hit of all the teams, with five separate failures across Chaz Mostert, Cam Waters, and Jason Bright’s cars.

The team was so concerned about the spontaneous failures that boss Tim Edwards said he was hoping the race would be red-flagged.

The team turned things around massively on Sunday, though, re-engineering its Fords to be more friendly to the soft compound rubber through the long Phillip Island corners.

That, combined with a revised driving style from the four drivers, saw the team avoid any failures on Sunday, with Mostert and Winterbottom completing a 27-lap final stint to finish 1-2.

The secret, according to Winterbottom, was a conservative driving approach and a ‘survivor’ style set-up.

“It was really weird, you are lifting at turn three, rolling off the throttle, you are lifting at the Hayshed which is normally flat, you are trying to race people while you are lifting to take the load off the tyre,” he said.

“It is a really strange way to go racing but you had to change your style a little bit.

“The engineering department worked like survivor almost, [they] set the car up to [survive] and then tried to make it quick from there. They did a great job and they spent a long time on Saturday night looking at it.

“Obviously when tyres blow you don’t have the carcass to look at, all it is shrapnel. You can’t say we are changing this for that, you just have to take an educated guess. They did that and they did a good job as all our cars survived well [on Sunday].”

Winterbottom also hinted that PRA has made headway with a braking issue he reckons has contributed to his poor start to the season.

“I haven’t been looking at the championship the way we have been going but Sunday was good for us,” he added.

“To be able to brake and not put on a heap of front bias has been nice ,and it is good result for us and the engineer as well because he has been trying to set it up to fix something that was a mechanical thing, not an engineering thing. He has been pulling his hair out.

“Your confidence in this sport can drop and all that sort of stuff, and until you get a result there is potential, but you have to get the result to actually make it real.”