2016 looks Bright

He may be welcoming two new teammates into the fold, but V8 Supercars veteran Jason Bright believes Brad Jones Racing will be in a better position next season than it was this time around. 

Tim Slade and Tim Blanchard join the group, as Fabian Coulthard and Dale Wood move on to DJR Team Penske and Nissan respectively. 

But behind the scenes there will be more stability, which Bright believes will be the key to getting BJR back to the pointy end. 

“There’ll be a little bit of a shake up again within the team but I feel like there’s enough stability within the engineering group and with myself there that we can hit the ground better than we did this year,” Bright told v8supercars.com.au. 

“This year we actually came into the year with a lot of changes to the car and the engineering structure and that’s probably what caught us out.”

Starting well at the Clipsal 500 with a top five finish and teammate Coulthard winning BJR’s first ever street race, Bright thinks the results lulled them into a false sense of security. 

The team had gone through a significant engineering restructure over the off-season, with Andrew Edwards shifting up to manage the group and Paul Scalzo moving into the race engineer role on car #8, from data engineer on #14. There will be some changes behind the scenes with Phil Keed off to DJR Team Penske with Coulthard, but the role will be filled from within, not by a new face. 

“We had a good performance in Adelaide and I reckon that caught us out as well because what worked there didn’t necessarily work at other places,” Bright said. 

Results were down in Tasmania, which is usually a strong track for Bright and BJR. While he stood on the podium twice in Sydney – once at Sydney Motorsport Park, and then the final weekend at Homebush where he celebrated his 50th podium – Bright wasn’t able to achieve a win this year. 

He finished 16th in the championship – a long way from seventh and 11th in the last two years – but is confident of an upturn in 2016. 

“I feel like going into next year we’re probably a step ahead of where we were going into this year,” he said. 

“For me, I had changes with the engineer and changes to the car – and there was probably a few too many changes. It took quite a while to unravel all the changes and end up back with something I was much happier with the end of the year.”

He noted the Homebush podium as his best race of the year and was confident the team was now moving in the right direction. 

“It was only the last couple of rounds I felt [confident] – I didn’t feel like we got on top of some of the earlier problems as quickly as we should’ve,” he said. 

Coulthard received a new chassis for the Darwin event, retiring the much-loved Tallulah, while Bright’s last upgrade was in 2014, after his major Adelaide rollover. He was coy on future plans. “There’s certainly some new cars in the pipeline,” he hinted.

Brad Jones Racing expands into the Kumho Series for 2016, and runs three Dunlop Series entries alongside its V8 Supercars Championship racers, giving the team depth and the ability to field cars for future talents.