On the face of it, today’s final day of the 2025 Perth Super 440 did not seem like a positive one for PremiAir Racing, with Jimmy Golding making contact to damage his car, be dropped down the field, and incur a drive through penalty with just eight laps to go while running up the pointy end of the field, while Richie Stanaway came home in P14.
While the race might not have turned out the way they wanted, the team is staunchly focused on the positives – after a tough start to the weekend, the car speed exhibited by Golding today was a huge turnaround, and while Stanaway was hampered by tough qualifying, he also put in a solid effort to rise through the field by five positions, with the Kiwi saying there is a lot to be learnt from this weekend that will benefit the season moving forward.
“I think we just got a bit of false confidence from Tassie and just got caught off guard this weekend with our approach, so we just really need to have a think about how we are going about it,” commented Stanaway. When you don’t have a good weekend you learn a lot from it, so it is not like we had a bad weekend and didn’t learn anything, so that is the positive to take away from it – we can improve for the rest of the season I think based on what we learnt this weekend.
“It was frustrating too out there with Bryce being a lap down between me and his teammates and wouldn’t get out of the way.
“”I asked him why he didn’t get out of the way being a lap down. They didn’t put the blue flags out and I am not sure why that happened, but they shouldn’t really have to, it is not great sportsmanship to just sit there. I used up so much tyre to get by Bryce and I shouldn’t have to do that when he is a lap down, I was trying to get to Macauley, I wasn’t worried about Jaxon as he had tyres on, but yeah, that was just frustrating.”
The day had started with Golding making it through to the Top Ten Shootout in P10, where he advanced to P6 to line up on the grid for race 16 this afternoon. Stanaway meanwhile had just missed out on making it through to part two of the knock-out qualifying by logging the 19th quickest time in qualifying.
Come the race, both drivers got off to a strong start, with Stanaway putting his head down and concentrating on advancing where he could while staying out of trouble. If it wasn’t for time lost in the first pit stop, it is possible he could have advanced even further.
Golding meanwhile was hard at work in the top five, before being disadvantaged by a safety car which saw two of his competitors able to jump him by completing their CPS under safety car conditions, where Golding had already completed his under green running. This saw Golding going on to do battle with Ryan Wood in P6 when with eight laps to go, disaster struck. The pair were running side by side through turns one, two and three, when they bumped in turn four, breaking the right steering arm of the #31. This pulled Golding into the side of Wood and saw both entries run off the road and down the order.
Golding limped his car back to the lane with the crew putting in a valiant effort to get the #31 back out onto the track before it returned to serve a pit lane penalty, resuming in time to cross the finish line in 22nd position.
PremiAir Racing will next be on-track for the Supercars Championship for the Darwin Triple Crown across June 20-22
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