Darwin weekend ‘an absolute mess’

After a reasonable fifth place result on Saturday, Mostert’s weekend took a turn for the worse on Sunday. He was a shock omission from the Top 10 Shootout after qualifying 13th, and then slipped back through the field to 17th during the 200-kilometre race.

Despite the reasonable Saturday result, Mostert described the entire weekend as ‘an absolute mess’ after being baffled by his lack of speed on Sunday.

“This weekend has been an absolute mess for us. We couldn’t get on top of the car,” he said.

“We tried heaps of different things; it’s just something fundamental with our car that somehow didn’t work up here, which is really unique.

“I thought we made some really good gains from last year coming into this weekend and this is the first event this year where we ended up worse than we did last year.

“[I’m] not overly happy, obviously, but it’s one of those things. We need to keep building and working on it in the down times and build it into something good for the next round.

“I think our normal car will work at the next event, it just didn’t work here for some reason.”

Mostert’s teammate Mark Winterbottom came into the Darwin round hoping to get his title hopes back on track after a positive mid-season test during the short break after Winton.

However the 2015 series champion failed to trouble the frontrunners at any point, finishing up with a pair of 14ths.

According to Winterbottom, the only silver lining is that he was able to match the times of Cam Waters – who was the only PRA driver to finish in the Top 10 in both races – once taking on the young star’s set-up.

“We put Cam’s complete set-up in for that race and when you look at our lap times we were a bit quicker than him, so it’s good for your self-confidence to know that when you’re driving the same car you can be as quick or quicker,” he said.

“I feel like that’s a positive.

“Now this setup has unlocked other issues that I think we could tune easier than what we could tune before.”

PRA still has three drivers in the Top 10 in the points, but they’re now all more than a round behind leader Fabian Coulthard. Mostert is fifth with a gap of 304, Winterbottom seventh another 102 points back, while Waters is ninth, 441 points off the lead.