BOOSTED by an off-season reunion with Mirko De Rosa, Tim Slade is motivated to recapture his best.
The popular veteran made an excellent start to life at PremiAir Racing, taking seven of the team’s first nine top 10s of the 2023 season.
But the deeper the campaign wore on, the more of a struggle it became for Slade and the #23 side of the garage, while teammate James Golding increasingly found his feet – particularly in terms of one-lap pace.
“To be honest, it was junk, horrendous, the back half of the year,” Slade told V8 Sleuth.
“I hated going the way we were.
“If you were to say to me that’s how it is going to be again this year, then I wouldn’t do it, I would do something else.
“I guess it was frustrating because we started the year so well.
“I felt as though up until, like even the first day at Darwin we still qualified in the 10 which wasn’t too bad, but it was probably more so up until Darwin I felt as though the potential was there, everything made sense and it was just a case of putting it together…
“It all just made perfect sense and then all of a sudden it didn’t, and it was just a struggle from then on really. It was super frustrating and it was shit.”
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The 38-year-old slipped all the way to 19th in the championship by season’s end.
But a summer engineering recruitment spree has brought fresh hope, with Ludo Lacroix joining from Dick Johnson Racing, and Slade back in cahoots with De Rosa – his race engineer for much of his Blanchard Racing Team tenure.
“It’s awesome. We have a really good relationship,” Slade said of De Rosa.
“He is one of the best guys I have ever worked with, so I can’t wait to get started with him again.”
PremiAir is just one of two main game teams to carry an unchanged primary driver line-up into the 2024 season, the other being DJR (Will Davison and Anton De Pasquale).
