Triple Eight at a loss over van Gisbergen car gremlins
Shane van Gisbergen’s race engineer Andrew Edwards has admitted the gremlins playing the #97 are “concerning” heading into the weekend.
Van Gisbergen was only 17th and 25th in Friday’s two practice sessions at the betr Darwin Triple Crown.
The reigning champion's Practice 1 was compromised by an issue with a test Safety Car system configuration.
The issue restricted van Gisbergen's car to 120km/h for much of the session, with the Kiwi losing an estimated 18 minutes of running.
Come Practice 2, and van Gisbergen was delayed by a hanging throttle and a steering problem, consigning him to second-last on the time sheets.
Throughout the session, van Gisbergen was plagued by a hanging throttle and left-hand down steering, and logged just seven laps — the fewest of any driver.
Van Gisbergen was in and out of the garage, with the steering issue seeing the team complete a set-up tweak with the track rods.
However, he said over team radio that something was still “broken”, and returned back to the garage.
The dramas ensure van Gisbergen — who is 172 points down — heads into Saturday knockout qualifying with little running.
“We don’t know — we’ve been struggled with it both practice sessions,” Edwards said on the broadcast.
“In the end, we were throwing some things at it to try some concepts to try and narrow it down.
“It’s just not making sense — under brakes, it’s pulling, but we can’t narrow it down.”
Van Gisbergen is a four-time Darwin winner, but lost points in Tasmania due to a rare DNF in the second race.
Conversely, series leader Brodie Kostecki was fourth in Practice 2, with Shell V-Power Racing Team driver Anton De Pasquale leading a Ford one-two-three.
When asked if the #97 got any meaningful running on Friday, Edwards replied: “We got nothing, both sessions pretty much a write-off.
"You just can’t lose that running time — straight into qualy tomorrow, we’ve got no confidence.
"We’ll regroup and have another go, it’s concerning… we can’t drive around this.”
Triple Eight is set to roll out the #97 for a ride session on Friday afternoon, which could give the team a chance to trial some fixes.
Supercars will return to the track in Darwin for ARMOR ALL Qualifying at 11:30am local time/12:00pm AEST on Saturday.
