CHAZ Mostert has thanked his Walkinshaw Andretti United crew for delivering him a car with which he could have a fun couple of Sunday races in Darwin.
After a slow start in Friday practice, Mostert admitted his surprise at even qualifying as well as 17th for Race 1.
He turned that into eighth, but any sort of momentum was reversed when the #25 Mobil 1 Optus Mustang was just 24th and 25th in the two Sunday qualifying sessions.
Mostert though was able to turn those lowly starts into 13th and ninth, pulling off a number of bold overtakes in the latter.
“To be totally honest, I had a lot of fun racing from where we started,” he told V8 Sleuth.
“I mean obviously from a performance point of view we want to be winning races and getting podiums but even starting towards the back we were able to race forward every race.
“We threw a lot of stuff at the car and definitely the car was by far its best in the last race.
“Just for whatever reason we weren’t quite in the window up here so to match the other Ford teams, we were towards the back end unfortunately.
“We got some good data throughout the races, we tried a lot of things and definitely things for Townsville I think we can correlate from where we were (in Darwin) to there. It’s another drive-based track.”
Remarkably, Mostert has kept himself within 179 points of the championship lead ahead of a likely pre-Townsville parity tweak.
Asked if he takes it upon himself to lift the team’s spirits amid a tough stretch, Mostert simply heaped praised on his “fantastic” crew.
“I’m just really proud of the guys that they never gave up,” he said.
“When you start on the last row of the grid, you can easily have a crew around you that can drop their lip and think they can’t get changes done in time.
“But the guys especially in this team at WAU, they’re putting their hand up: ‘just throw whatever you want on the set-up sheet and we’ll get it done, we need to learn’.
“Everyone has the same goal here and I really love that drive from within so for myself when I’m driving the car, that’s the drive that I have behind the wheel as well. I love my team, we never give up.
“It’s just good to repay them with some results with big gains going forward because I don’t think we deserve to be back there for how much effort we put in.”
WAU is not due to test again until after the NTI Townsville 500 (July 7-9).
