With the official Supercars Championship pre-enduro test day now complete at Queensland Raceway, it is all eyes forward for PremiAir Racing and its fellow competitors to the start of 2025’s endurance season: The Bend 500 at The Bend Motorsport Park (September 12-14).
Jimmy Golding and co-driver David Russell (#31 PremiAir Racing Camaro) and Richie Stanaway and co-driver Nash Morris (#62 PremiAir Racing Camaro) turned plenty of laps at the Ipswich venue known affectionately as ‘The Paperclip’ on Monday in preparation for the highly intense challenge which awaits them at The Bend and just weeks’ later, Mount Panorama (Bathurst 1000 – October 9-12).
“It has been a good test day,” comment Stanaway. “There have been a few things I have wanted to try that I have been looking forward to for months but you never have a chance to try them on a race weekend so it has been really exciting to finally try those setup changes and just confirm a few things.
“Nash is up to speed so he is doing a really good job. We moved through all of our endurance procedures, driver changes, and just got comfortable with all of those procedures – it has been a good day.”
While the focus of the day wasn’t primarily on lap times with a much bigger agenda at play, at the close of the day PremiAir Racing laid claim to the 11th and 15th quickest times overall and was consistently within the top ten and top five runners at different parts of the program.
“We had no problems today, I think once we put a foot in the gravel, that is about it,” said Ludo Lacroix – Competition Director, PremiAir Racing. “We went through a lot of things, we went through our pit stop strategy, pit stop change, brake change, driver change, fuel load… The car has been pretty pacey, and the co-drivers have been pretty pacey which is pleasing – that is on this track, so we need to make sure they will be quite fit for the next track.
” Luckily Nash is doing a race with GT4 the week before so that will open his eyes at The Bend for our first enduro race in three weeks.
“Look, we are coming off an okay weekend, and we probably did one or two changes that were interesting. We don’t always need to be changing things on these sorts of days, we have the help of Triple Eight most of the time, so we just need to understand what we have done and talk to them and understand if it is a way forward.
“But all drivers seem to be happy, and the cars have run faultless with no issues, so I am happy and we carry on and dig deeper and learn more and understand more of the car, have the drivers understand more of the tyre, and try and get to the pointy end and get into the top ten all of the time, not just some of the time.”
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