Andre Heimgartner has impressed in his first race weekend with Nissan Motorsport in the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship.
Heimgartner qualified 11th fastest in his first ever qualifying session with the team on Saturday, improving on that on Sunday to be in the top ten shootout with the seventh fastest lap time.
“It was pretty good to be into the top ten shootout in only my second qualifying session with Nissan Motorsport, unfortunately my time was voided for a kerb strike – we would have been fifth or sixth I think if it hadn’t been for that. It is what it is though.The positive is that the car was pretty fast,” Heimgartner explained.
When it came to racing, the 22-year-old Kiwi showed plenty of promise – running well into the top ten during Saturday’s race before coming to grief avoiding a spinning competitor in the last third of the race. He would persevere through leg-numbing seat issues to move back up from 21st to 17th by the end of the race. On Sunday he would start 10th ahead of a strong first half of the race before engine issues would intervene.
“We had some dramas with the seat fit on Saturday, putting pressure on the wrong areas and causing a fair bit of pain and my legs to go numb which you certainly don’t want around the Adelaide 500 circuit!” said Heimgartner.
“We pushed through and we would have been higher up if it wasn’t for getting stuck behind a spinning car, but for our first race the car was quick and I feel like we really had the potential there.
“Come Sunday, we started in the top ten and ran pretty strongly before unfortunately we had smoke coming into the cabin and lost power – we brought it into the garage and worked hard to get back out and be classified as a finisher – it wasn’t how we wanted to end the weekend of course, especially when we had the potential for a top ten finish, but there are lots of positive take aways and we will regroup ready for the Grand Prix in a few weeks’ time.”
Heimgartner will next be on-track with Nissan Motorsport in the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship at the Australian Grand Prix across March 21 to 24. Before then however, he will fly over to his native New Zealand to compete in the final round of the 2017/2018 BNT V8s championship at Hampton Downs next weekend (March 9-11) – he is currently leading the championship.
“I am looking forward to getting back to New Zealand and hopefully we can clinch the title over there,” Heimgartner said.
“Hampton Downs is an awesome facility and I can’t wait to see what we can do there.”
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