Mostert: De Borre stronger for Penske stint

Chaz Mostert says that his returning race engineer Adam De Borre will be more valuable to Prodrive than ever in 2017 after spending last year at DJR Team Penske.

The much-vaunted Mostert/De Borre partnership kicked back into gear on Tuesday at the Sydney test, ending the afternoon session with the fourth fastest time.

It was an encouraging start to the new campaign for Mostert, who on return from injury went winless through the 2016 season.

Mostert was without De Borre, who he’d worked with across stints at Dick Johnson Racing and Prodrive, after the latter’s move home to New South Wales for family reasons.

De Borre worked remotely for Penske last year, where he engineered Scott Pye, before striking a similar deal with Prodrive for his return in 2017.

“The test for us was about getting the eye back in and working with De Borre again,” Mostert told Supercars.com.

“It’s an old partnership and a new partnership, because he’s learnt a lot going away for a year and brought some new ideas.

“It’s definitely been good for him to go and do that last year.

“We were trying to work out what the new tyre does, how the tyre pressures should be and all of that sort of stuff.

“It was pretty structured type of running and we tried to work on some new things that’ve been in the pipeline.

“I’m pretty excited about the year. We found some more positives and also some negatives, but it gets you excited heading into the first round finding some little gains.”

Prodrive ran different testing programs across its four cars, with new recruit Jason Bright the only other to undertake an afternoon burst on the super soft tyre.

Bright ended up 14th in the order while Mark Winterbottom was 17th and Cameron Waters, who struggled with brake issues for the majority of the day, 21st.

“The new tyres don’t seem to have had that big an impact yet,” mused Bright, who rejoins the team after a 10 year absence.

“I’m pretty happy with the car, pretty happy with how the day went, we didn’t have any dramas so I’m looking forward to Adelaide. 

“I wasn’t really happy with the (super soft) run, we had a run on them previous to that and we were probably a little bit better.

“I felt like we were better on the soft tyre than what we were on the super soft right at the end but we’ll have a look at that. 

“Chaz obviously had a pretty good time at the end there. I don’t think there’s too much wrong with the car.

“(But) there’s certainly a few different things driving these cars compared to where I’ve been that I’ve got to get used to particularly for qualifying.”