TEAM 18 is determined to make sure its Albert Park podium is no flash in the pan.
The Mount Waverley squad’s previous breakthroughs – Scott Pye’s Darwin hat-trick in 2020 and Mark Winterbottom’s win there last year – had been expected to open the floodgates, only for results to instead dry up.
New team principal Adrian Burgess has put that down to a lack of deeper understanding about the good and the bad of the car, something which he’s gone about rectifying.
Now is the chance to prove it, following Winterbottom’s fine second-place finish in Race 2 of the 2024 MSS Security Melbourne SuperSprint yesterday.
MORE: Winterbottom hails ‘ridiculous’ Albert Park sprint racing
Team owner Charlie Schwerkolt was delighted after having overhauled the squad in the off-season, bringing in Burgess, technical director Geoff Slater, #18 race engineer Som Sharma, and #20 driver David Reynolds.
“I have invested: a great team manager, big in engineering, done all of that. We’re fair dinkum about getting up the pointy end,” Schwerkolt told V8 Sleuth.
“We have got some amazing sponsors, some amazing people in the team. We have got the culture.
“Adrian promised we are going to get some trophies this year – just a couple, two or three if we can for the whole year – and I believe in him, I have known him for a long time.”
Perhaps cognisant of previous post-podium droughts, Schwerkolt is not getting ahead of himself with raising the trophies target.
“We’re going to keep working hard. There’s a lot of work to do, there’s still more we need,” he said.
“When you’re playing with the big boys, there’s not much in it, so we have got to work hard.”
Team 18 is now third in the teams’ championship with both Reynolds and Winterbottom inside the top 10 in the drivers’ standings.
A pair of Supercars qualifying sessions will kick off the Saturday action at Albert Park from 9am AEDT.
