Slade celebrates 200 starts

Supercheap Auto racer Tim Slade lines up at Queensland Raceway for his 200th V8 Supercars race start this afternoon.

The circuit played host to one of his career highlights back in 2011, and he will be looking to move up the field in this afternoon's soft tyre only race at the Coates Hire Ipswich SuperSprint.

Slade - who began his career in 2009 - had his best Championship result in his 2012 year with Stone Brothers Racing. As the team morphed into Erebus Motorsport for 2013 in the Car of the Future era, there were some lesser results before Slade elected to shift to Walkinshaw Racing to steer the Supercheap Auto Racing Commodore for 2014 and '15.

"It was probably here [at Queensland Raceway]," he said when asked of his career highlights so far.

"2011 was my first podium and I don't think we were outside of the top three all weekend. I was with SBR, this was our test track so we'd done plenty of miles around here and understood the car pretty well.

"We dropped it on the track on Friday, it was on fire and stayed on fire until Sunday afternoon. That was definitely a highlight.

"I think my one and only pole at Homebush with SBR and fifth in the Championship that year as well was pretty cool."

Slade's fifth position in the Championship in '12 saw him 'best of the rest', home behind the Triple Eight and Ford Performance Racing cars.

But with an extensive switch to Mercedes Benz E63 AMGs for 2013, a learning year followed, which meant Slade was not as well-positioned to shoot for his first win.

"The last few years have been pretty rough, ever since [what] was a good year in 2012," Slade said.

"You go from finishing second and fourth and a pole at Homebush to qualifying third last at Clipsal the following year with all the change with the Erebus deal, so that was tough.

"To come back from ad the last couple of years have been up and down as well - and that's my story for 200 races."

While he is still hunting for his maiden V8 Supercars win, Slade declared he had no regrets and would push on with his Supercheap Auto Racing crew to back up his second place finish in yesterday's practice.

"No [regrets] - a lot of the things just happened outside of your control and no regrets," he said.

This afternoon's second race is Slade's 200th and he starts from 17th on the grid for the soft Dunlop tyre sprint.He finished race one 12th.