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Mostert surprised by first-lap damage

06 Nov 2017
Prodrive ace expected worse from intra-team clash
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Mostert: 'What could have been'

Chaz Mostert says he was surprised his Prodrive Falcon emerged with as little damage as it did from the opening-lap ITM Auckland SuperSprint melee.

Three Prodrive Falcons tangled at Turn 8 on the opening lap of Sunday’s race, having qualified together in third, fourth and fifth.

Cam Waters, on the very inside, hit Mark Winterbottom, pushing him into Mostert on the outside.

Waters continued to finish third, with stewards taking no action on the incident, but Mostert went around and Winterbottom stopped alongside him.

While Winterbottom bore the brunt of the ensuing contact, Mostert’s Supercheap Falcon was also tagged at either end by the Commodores of Tim Slade and James Courtney.

Mostert was able to resume, and fought his way back up to seventh.

“I thought there would be a lot of damage,” he told Supercars.com.

“It was a decent hit in the back there, which turned me around, but I got some front contact as well.

“As my engineer said, I think I was lucky I rolled off the brake when it started to roll backwards, I think the hit was a bit minimal and just pushed me wide.

“I actually expected to come in at the end of the race and see the front of the car was kicked or something, we had a bit of an aero misbalance.

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“But until we get back to the workshop we can’t really work that out. The car was really fast.”

Having finished 23rd on Saturday following a penalty for his incident with David Reynolds and subsequently Fabian Coulthard, Mostert dropped from 126 points behind Jamie Whincup to 264 off over the weekend.

That means he is essentially only a mathematical chance of winning the title in Newcastle later this month, with 300 available across the two races.

Mostert admitted the troubles were spread across him and the car at Pukekohe.

“We struggled with the car most of the weekend and, actually, in that last race I think we got on top of what we had,” he said.

“We had a fair few braking issues and we kept thinking it was the car but it was actually something else.

“In that last race, it was disappointing to be in a lap one incident that put us back, obviously [on Saturday] struggling with the braking-type stuff I made a balls-up trying to get as many points as I could.

“Not a very good weekend from a driving point of view for me, also we struggled a bit.

“The pace is obviously in the car, [on Sunday] we showed it can be at the front and at the pointy end.

“So it was disappointing not to get some champagne for the Supercheap Auto guys, the car they gave me today definitely deserved it.”

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