This weekend’s WD-40 Phillip Island 500 started off in a challenging fashion for Andre Heimgartner, but by the close of the second race the Nissan Motorsport steerer was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Heimgartner and his #7 Plus Fitness entry struggled for high-speed balance during Friday’s practice sessions, seeing him able to post a best result for the day of only 21st fastest (practice one).
The 22-year-old and his engineer Dilan Talabani went to work overnight, and returned the next day with a slightly improved package which Heimgartner was able to muscle through to 15th position in the first race of the weekend, an improvement of five spots from his starting position.
Come Sunday, further work on the #7 yielded a more promising package, with the Melbourne-based Kiwi able to bring it home in 14th position. Most importantly, after a couple of challenging weekends, Heimgartner believes an upswing is ahead.
“We certainly had a challenging day on Friday, but the reality of this place is that even when the car isn’t exactly how you might like it to be, Phillip Island is still a lot of fun to drive around!” Heimgartner said.
“We had a lot of homework to do on Friday to make sure we could improve and also ensure we were consistent come Saturday. While that didn’t have quite the impact in qualifying that we had hoped, for the race we certainly made some gains and were able to bring ourselves up five positions to finish in 15th position, despite battling through a pretty congested mid-pack.
“The car had relatively good speed at that point and we did seem to have unlocked something in the set-up between qualifying and the race, so we were feeling more confident than we had been the day before.
“There is always more to be done though so we went back to work again on Saturday evening, and that paid off with some more gains for Sunday’s action where we finished the race with a weekend-best of 14th.
“Of course we want to be higher up, but after a challenging couple of weekends it was really great to be starting to make those gains, and I am sure we can continue that momentum on our way to Perth for the next round.”
Andre Heimgartner will next be on track with Nissan Motorsport in the Virgin Australia Supercars for the Perth SuperSprint, to be held across May 4-6, 2018.
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