Courtney's brutal assessment of BRT's Taupō struggles
James Courtney labels Taupō his "worst ever” weekend
Both BRT Mustangs filled the final row in all qualifying sessions
Courtney, Aaron Cameron finished no higher than 20th
James Courtney has labelled Taupō as his "worst ever” weekend in Supercars on what was a trying outing for Blanchard Racing Team.
BRT teammates Courtney and Aaron Cameron were 21st and 22nd overall for the weekend, with the average finish across the two cars in the three races just 21.3.
Cameron marked his second BRT round with finishes of 20th, 24th and 21st, with Courtney 21st, 22nd and 20th.
Remarkably, BRT Mustangs filled the last row on the grid for all three races, with the team’s lead car 0.45s, 0.38s and 0.18s behind their closest rival in the three qualifying sessions.
When asked to sum up his weekend on Supercars’ Cool Down Lap podcast, Courtney — veteran of 260 rounds and 587 races — said: "This is my worst ever, in history."
When asked why, he added: “Just everything. Everything could go wrong, went wrong.
"Zero car speed. Mechanical failures. Just... yeah, everything. Pretty embarrassing, from my point of view.
“As a team... to qualify half a second from the second last row is embarrassing. So, a lot of soul searching in here needs to be done.
"A lot of money's being spent by JB [John Blanchard] and Tim [Blanchard] and to get those sorts of results and that sort of performance is embarrassing."
When asked if there was more speed on one tyre versus the other, the 2010 Supercars champion replied: "Not at any point was it looking like it was gonna be speedy.
“We had the pit stop in the first race and we sort of strategically jumped a few guys, only did two tyre where everyone did four, so we sort of got in amongst it a little bit.
"I did my best to hold everyone off and caused a bit of action, get a bit of Snowy [River Caravans] air time for a while there.
“But ultimately, running the car speed that we had, the tyre deg that we had and only doing the two tyres, we were gonna get smoked in the end.
“Not a lot of light coming outta the weekend."
The 2025 Repco Supercars Championship will resume at the Snowy River Caravans Tasmania Super 440 on May 9-11. Tickets are on sale now.
