Craig Lowndes drove a strong race to finish seventh at the Barbagello Raceway in Perth this afternoon. The Supercar veteran stated from ninth on the grid and made up two places over the course of the 150km race and he puts his performance down to ensuring his tyres stayed alive throughout the event.
Lowndesy checked during earlier practice just how long he could run on the super soft tyres and still keep competitive lap times. This gave him a lot of confidence going into the race…
"We had one more practice session to finalise everything and we opted to do a race run," he said. "To do a 34-lap run around here on one set of tyres was pretty encouraging, it gave us a lot of confidence going into the race.”
The 15 minute qualifying session left him down in P9 so he had to make sure he stayed out of trouble at the start…
"In qualifying I made a few little mistakes and you only need to make a few little mistakes around here to make a big difference to where you start. Starting ninth wasn't ideal, but it was good enough to stay out of trouble. In the race we had a good car, but we got caught in traffic early," he said. Explaining that he then had a minor issue in his one and only pit stop…
"We had an issue with the pit stop, which lost us a few seconds, but when we rejoined the car was really good. It was fast, looked after its tyres and once we got into clean air it was really quick. Finishing seventh from ninth was okay, we would have liked to be a bit further up, but that's the way it goes."
