Pit stop nightmare costs Golding potential podium
Disastrous pit stop costs James Golding potential second career podium
Golding had climbed to third in opening stint from sixth on the grid
Matt Payne jumps into fifth in points, four points clear of Golding
James Golding and PremiAir Nulon Racing have been left to rue a costly pit stop blunder that has seen the Victorian lose a potential second podium in three rounds.
Having scored a first career podium at Sandown alongside David Russell, Golding has been in arguably career-best form as of late, and qualified sixth today after the Boost Mobile Top Ten Shootout.
Golding made a brilliant start to climb up to fourth, and then made his way past Richie Stanaway's fading Mustang to climb into the top three in the early stages of the race.
However, Golding's race unravelled dramatically on lap 26 when he came in for his first pit stop, which turned into a nightmare for the PremiAir Nulon Racing crew.
The left rear tyre change was drastically elongated by a cross-threaded wheel nut, with the issue seeing Golding go plummeting from the podium to well outside the top 10.
16th at the finish was all Golding could muster from what was a promising day up to that point, with the result also seeing him drop outside the top five in the championship behind Matt Payne.
The wheel nut wasn't the only issue Golding faced in a tough Saturday afternoon on the Gold Coast, having also been dealing with a failed cool suit and a communications issue.
“About five laps into the race the cool suit failed, and then not long after my radio to the team failed so I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear anything I was saying, which didn’t make it easy as you often want to know information and you can’t ask anything," said Golding.
"And with the cool suit, I was just getting hotter and hotter – I ended up pulling the ends off and blowing all the water out so it didn’t keep heating me up with my body temperature and that helped get me through, but in the last six laps or so I was deteriorating a bit, so I was glad to get to the end.
"And of course, we had the drama with the wheel nut in the pit stop, which was unfortunate as we had an awesome start and were up to P3. It just really wasn’t our day, but we will have another go tomorrow and hopefully everything works out.
"The car is pretty good, we will try and improve in a couple of areas but we have a few major things to tick off before we stress about that.”
On track action at the Boost Mobile Gold Coast 500 continues on Sunday with Boost Mobile Qualifying at 10:10am local time/11:10am AEDT. Tickets for the event are on sale now.
