Feeney keen to move on from Taupō 'rollercoaster'
Triple Eight misses podium for first time in 2024
Will Brown ninth, Broc Feeney 21st after early spin
Feeney, Brown battled with tyre life in wet race
Broc Feeney is keen to forget about his troubled run to 21st in Taupō in what proved a dramatic race for Red Bull Ampol Racing.
Feeney dropped from 17 to 59 points behind teammate Will Brown, who scrambled to ninth in a race won by Brad Jones Racing driver Andre Heimgartner.
Saturday's wet-weather thriller was the first race of the season without a Triple Eight driver on the podium.
However, Brown and Feeney's blushes were spared by a loose wheel for closest points rival Chaz Mostert, who dropped a lap and was classified 22nd.
"The weather was pretty challenging today to say the least – it was a rollercoaster of a race,” Feeney said.
"I spun at the start but clawed our way back to a pretty good position, but overall it was tough one. We’ll forget about today and focus on tomorrow.
"After my spin, I felt like I made some really good moves and had some really good pace, but we sort of just lost that for the rest of the race.
"The conditions were very challenging today, I couldn’t really see anything but that’s no excuse to our result at all – everyone had to battle through the same conditions.
"It was so cool to see so many fans stick around for our race to cheer us on in these conditions, you guys were amazing.”
Brown led the race in the first stint after the start-line incident that took pole-sitter Cam Waters and Tim Slade out of contention, but after being passed by Heimgartner in the pits, the #87 Camaro plummeted down the order.
An earlier-than-desired second stop put Brown back into the hunt for the top five, before he eventually fell to ninth, his first finish outside the top two this season,
"It was a pretty tough race for us. I got a good start and managed to get the lead which was really good before the Safety Car, but then I lost a fair bit of grip and didn’t have it underneath me later in the first stint,” Brown said.
"I had to pit early and go onto the tyres a lot earlier than we would have liked, which made the run home much more difficult.
"It was a hard stint home and we probably recovered as good as we could have, so overall it was a pretty tough day.
"We’ll tune it up for tomorrow and keep positive because we’ve been fast, but it was a tougher race than we would have liked.
"Tomorrow is looking dry, so we’ll go back to our dry set-up and look back at our car and those laps in the dry when we were fast, and just try to have a solid one tomorrow."
