SOME would be jumping for joy at the thought of having two drivers inside the top five in the Supercars standings and a hold of second in the teams’ championship.
Not Grove Racing.
The ambitious Ford squad and its team principal David Cauchi, a championship-winning engineer from his Triple Eight days, made that clear in assessing the first quarter of their 2024 season.
There have been pole positions, podiums and career-bests, but also missed opportunities and a growing gap to leaders Triple Eight, who’ve opened up a 448-point buffer atop the teams’ championship.
Cauchi has accordingly rated his outfit’s performance to date as “a B-, maybe a C+”.
“Our performance and results so far have been positive, but also on a lot of levels maybe a bit disappointing,” Cauchi said in a Penrite Racing video.
“I think we have definitely set ourselves some high targets and the expectation now within the team is very high, coming off a few wins at the end of last year.
“Once you’ve tasted that, it’s hard to go back to thirds and fourths, so I think we definitely want more out of the year.
“Of course, we want to keep improving and I feel like we’re definitely doing that.
“So far I would probably give us about a B-, maybe a C+.
“Sitting second in the teams’ championship is really positive but the gap to first is a bit bigger than we would like, so we need to work hard now to start to close that gap down and really see some consistency in our performance week in, week out.”
CEO Brenton Grove echoed those sentiments.
“It’s a challenging one because we’re trying to grow the team and celebrate the milestones and the achievements that we have. But it’s also a very fine balancing act that we don’t want to accept results that aren’t where we want to be,” he said.
“There are some positives certainly, but we’ve led three races and we’ve won none of them, so that probably shows a bit of the story of the year as to where we are: we’ve got performance, we’ve got potential, but we’re not maximising it.
“That’s the focus for us moving forward… at the end of the day, we’re on the right trajectory and hopefully we can have that breakthrough – and I think once that comes, we’ll be a hard team to stop.
“But there’s a lot of things we need to do to get to that point and do that consistently.”
