Reynolds' form pushing Erebus development

Erebus Motorsport manager Barry Ryan says David Reynolds’ recent performances have put the onus on the team to deliver a car capable of winning this season.

Reynolds claimed third place on Sunday at Phillip Island while team-mate Dale Wood took a season-high eighth place in one of the best results for the team since its switch to Holden.

In his second season with Erebus, Reynolds sits 11th in the championship and has proven quick throughout the campaign.

Ryan believes the Albury-born racer is driving at the top of his abilities and maximising the current potential of the Erebus package.

“It was very rare for him to genuinely think he could have done a better job (in 2016), because the car wasn’t good enough apart from the last few rounds last year,” Ryan told Supercars.com

“This weekend there were times he got out of the car and he said ‘sorry, I could have done a better job’. 

“The car was working like he wanted it to. He was having to push and being able to because the car was good enough to find that next level. 

“His error factor is so minute it’s hard to even pick them. He’s driving really well. 

“The reason we got him is so we didn’t have any question over the driver. 

“It’s all up to us to get the car right so we can win races."

The team was forced to halt introducing a slew of updates to its Commodore package at Phillip Island on the eve of practice.

Despite the delay, Reynolds still says the team is making impressive progress after its Holden switch.

“We’ve been working really really hard since we started at the team last year,” said Reynolds. 

“We have had a massive learning curve last year and it’s just going from strength to strength. We are still not there yet. 

“We’ve got a lot of things we need to improve and areas we need to improve on. 

“We built some bits for this weekend, they arrived on Thursday night to try and improve the car. 

“We built them up midnight Thursday and built them to the car but they didn’t fit so we will have to wait to next round to try them.”

Ryan explained the team will literally return to the drawing board to have the new parts ready for the Perth SuperSprint.

“We didn’t have the luxury of having our whole car drawn in CAD (Computer Aided Design software),” he said.

“Last year we didn’t have a really strong engineering group until Alistair (McVean, car #9 engineer) came on-board. 

“That’s no disrespect to anyone, we just didn’t. 

“We didn’t have drawings of the Walkinshaw car when we got it, we just bought a car. 

“The boys have done a really good job with the CAD we’ve got at the moment, but we didn’t have the whole thing. 

“We designed things and engineered them and thought they should fit, we got to the track and there’s some things we couldn’t put in the car and we decided to scrap it around midnight on Thursday and do it properly for Perth.”

Despite the delay, Ryan believes the team has found its setup sweet spot after proving quick at a variety of tracks.

“We’ve got a base setup we can work around and it’s worked at all different sorts of tracks; Adelaide, Albert Park, Symmons Plains and Phillip Island,” he added.

“Alistair is going a good job with Mirko (De Rosa, car #99 engineer) and we’ve just got to be smart about it and make sure the changes aren’t going to the extreme and panicky.

“That was the thing that would prove it wasn’t a fluke, because last year at Phillip Island we were dreadful. 

“We didn’t even look at what we did there the year before. Only to see what we shouldn’t do.”