THE Blanchard Racing Team knew there would be some short-term pain for long-term gain when it promoted rookie Aaron Love and it sure felt it yesterday.
Love, 21, endured a difficult start to his solo Supercars career, crashing twice in near-identical fashion at the Cutting during Race 1 of the Thrifty Bathurst 500.
Love was overtly apologetic over team radio following the second shunt, which left him to join fellow rookie Ryan Wood (Walkinshaw Andretti United) in being yet to open his points tally for 2024.
“To have the same incident basically happen twice is pretty disappointing, but there has been a lot of positives throughout the weekend too so it’s just part of the process of a young team and a young driver,” BRT boss Tim Blanchard told V8 Sleuth.
“He’s pretty hard on himself. We saw that last year in Super2, he’s very hard on himself but he also rebounds very strongly too.”
Part of taking on a rookie is taking the good with the bad, Blanchard added.
“This isn’t a one-weekend program for Aaron, this is something like Groves and Triple Eight have done with (Matt) Payne and (Broc) Feeney, this is something where we’re looking to the future,” said Blanchard.
“There’s going to be a bit of pain at the start as you build – we knew that when we signed up to it. You’d obviously prefer not to have it but that’s part of the learning process.”
Both Love and veteran teammate James Courtney are understood to be on two-year deals through 2025.
Courtney had a solid day in his first race for BRT, starting and finishing 15th.
“We’ve set the benchmark with where we’re at, we’ve found out where we sit in the pecking order; now we have just got to focus on how to improve from there,” Blanchard said.
Supercars action resumes today with Boost Mobile Qualifying for Race 2 from 9:30am AEDT.
