Tander looks for qualifying lift

Holden hardman Garth Tander will be looking for an improved qualifying performance to help him continue a stellar Reid Park run of results at the July 10-12 Castrol EDGE Townsville 400.

While Tander expects his Holden Racing Team Commodore VF to perform well in Townsville, he admits the qualifying issues that have re-emerged recently have him puzzled.

Tander has scored three wins, an incredible total of 10 podiums and only once finished outside the top 10 from 13 starts at the unique north Queensland venue, which combines elements of both a street circuit and permanent race track.

The last two years he has led teammate James Courtney home in one-two finishes, the 2013 result breaking a 58 race losing streak for the factory team that stretched back to the 2011 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000.

"We need to make sure our package is better in qualifying because we have proven in the races that the race pace is fine, or certainly closer to where it needs to be," Tander told v8supercars.com.au in the build-up to the Townsville event.

"We just can't start that far behind."

The 38-year old veteran's battle to extract qualifying pace from the HRT Commodore has been well chronicled in the New Generation V8 Supercar era. But that issue seemed behind him and this year as he started strongly with six top 10 starts in seven qualifying attempts from Race 3 in Adelaide through Tasmania and Perth.

Since then, however, he hasn't cracked the top 10 and was a disastrous 23rd on Sunday in Darwin. After running as high as third in the Championship early in the year he has now dropped to ninth.

"I thought we were on top of that (qualifying) to be honest," he admitted. "In Perth we qualified strongly, in Tassie we qualified strongly but we haven't got it right the last two that's for sure.

"To be honest I don't know why."

Perhaps reassuring for Tander in a way is that he is not alone in the four car Walkinshaw Racing squad struggling in qualifying. While Courtney has two poles and an average qualifying position of 7.3, Tander's average is 11.7, Supercheap Autos Tim Slade's is 11.9 and Team 18's Lee Holdsworth in the customer car is 16.1.

"I just think we are simply not fast enough in qualifying and you need to look at all of the cars as an average and the last two events the average of all our cars is certainly in the low teens I would imagine, so we need to improve that," Tander said.

"Sure James got pole in qually one at Darwin but the sum of all our cars was not good at all. In the races I felt our car speed was okay, but we were just coming from too far behind. And that was the same at Winton, our car speed in the races was fine but when you are starting buried in the pack you get caught up in first corner crashes or you give the opposition too much of a head start.

"So the take out of Winton and Darwin is that we simply need to qualify better."

The chances of a better qualifying performance and therefore race result at Townsville are high because of the way Walkinshaw Racing cars seem to traditionally work well at the circuit. Tander qualified 2-11-4/5 (in the Sunday ARMOR ALL Top 10 Shootout) at Townsville last year and translated that into 2-1-2 finishes.

But given the high rate of development across V8 Supercar teams, he warned HRT's recent stellar record at the circuit could not simply be expected to continue.

"Just because you have had success there in the past doesn't mean you are going to roll up there and have success again. To be honest, we felt our car wasn't that good there last year. We had good strategy and we had good pace at certain stages of the race. If we took last year's car there this year it wouldn't be good enough to win.

"We have built a package now that when we get the most out of it, it is going to be competitive and it is going to give us a better than even chance of being competitive with the recognised series standouts, which are still Prodrive Racing Australia and Triple Eight Racing Australia.

"But we still have work to do there's no two ways about that."