TICKFORD Racing team manager Matt Roberts has admitted Cam Waters’ brand-new Supercar was not back to 100 percent in time for Sunday’s Albert Park finale.
Waters crashed heavily after colliding with Matt Payne in a fight for the lead on Lap 2 of the Saturday evening race, necessitating a rebuild job that ran until 2:30am – less than eight hours before Race 4 of the weekend.
The Monster Energy star started third for that encounter but did not have the pace for anything better than seventh in the end.
Roberts said even after an all-hands-on-deck effort, the #6 Ford was still hurting.
“It was an extensive repair; the car is still wounded, we can’t hide behind that,” he told the Schick Cool Down Lap podcast post-race on Sunday.
“There’s lots of bent bars. We couldn’t possibly change all of those bent bars last night, it just wouldn’t have been possible to get it back out today.
“We did the critical bars that needed to be done, so two complete corners, left and right front, and one rear complete corner, so it was a huge amount of work, a lot of rig work, bars going back in and bits and pieces.
“I think we finished it with about 15 minutes to go this morning before the dummy grid so there was a couple of nervous moments this morning, there always is.
“We tried to get the crew out as quick as possible last night but unfortunately we left here at about 10 to three this morning and there’s always one or two things to come back to in the morning to double check and make sure you’re right.
“He started in third today. We knew before we went out there that we were wounded but we hung on and finished (P7) today, so we were happy with that.
“We got some good team points, obviously Tom finishing fourth, and hopefully we can be eyes forward to Taupō now and we’ll focus on that.”
Tickford now has a few weeks to fully repair the TR-30 chassis, which was on debut at Albert Park, before the inaugural ITM Taupō Super400 on April 19-21.
