Team Sydney’s tough return home

There was a step forward on one side of the garage and a step back on the other but all in all, Team Sydney departed their second straight home round last weekend with a feeling of disappointment.

Despite tyre rules mixing up the pecking order, the Holden team could only manage a best result of 18th, achieved by Chris Pither in Sunday’s earlier race.

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While others were able to cash in when they used their two soft tyre sets, Team Sydney appeared to struggle to make inroads on the faster compound.

It was not all bad news though, with Pither qualifying inside the top 20 for each race and making the Top 15 Shootout on Saturday.

The 2018 Dunlop Super2 Series winner reported feeling more at ease with his #22 Coca-Cola Commodore after being stumped at the end of the June event at Sydney Motorsport Park.

“I felt the car was a lot better in comparison to last round for me to drive, a bit more comfortable,” Pither said.

“I felt like I could place the car where I needed to but unfortunately it didn’t really generate more speed so that’s always disappointing.

“A car that feels comfortable to drive isn’t always a fast car… we need to go back to the drawing board a bit and hopefully we can find some tell-tales that we can learn from.”

Teammate Alex Davison had left the first Sydney event full of excitement about the potential of his Local Legends Holden package, before enduring a testing return.

“It was probably a bit more of a battle than I had hoped,” admitted the 40-year-old, who has won the intra-team qualifying battle on six of eight occasions thus far.

“The first SMP there was a lot of positives, we sort of jumped up a few times and things were making sense and we were being very methodical about the way we were doing things.

“We were sort of quietly confident that we could make a step forward this weekend and that wasn’t the case.

“We really struggled with the car, we didn’t change a lot but we really lost in terms of understanding it.

“These things happen, I have done it before and you can turn it around pretty easily but we’re going to need to do a bit of a reset.”

Team Sydney will look for a form spike at the Darwin doubleheader next month, the BetEasy Triple Crown event coming first on August 8-9.