IRWIN Racing Sandown race 2 report

IRWIN RACING RUES MISSED CHANCE

IRWIN Racing is lamenting a missed opportunity to take a well deserved top 10 result in today’s V8 Supercar race at Sandown Raceway.

#4 Irwin Racing: Alex Davison

Photo by: Chris Von Wieldt

After qualifying a disappointing 20th; some strong pace, a good strategy and a quick pit stop elevated Alex Davison to 12th, with an eye firmly on the top 10.

With less than 20 laps to go, Davison was side by side with Russell Ingall and Steve Johnson going into the left hander at Dandenong Road, before being squeezed out by the Paul Morris Motorsport driver.

Ingalls move turned Johnson around and blocked Davison, who dropped from 12th to 17th.

In the last laps, Davison was able to improve to 15th, which is where he would finish, but it was too little too late for the fast finishing IRWIN Tools driver.

Davison is still hanging onto ninth place in the championship, but has Fabian Coulthard and Tim Slade biting at his heels wanting to take his place.

The final event of the 2011 V8 Supercars championship is in Sydney in a fortnight’s time.

What IRWIN Racing’s Alex Davison had to say:

“It can’t get any worse, we had a pretty good comeback and could have snuck into the top 10 before another brain dead bloody idiot crashed into the back of me and caused an accident. Russell Ingall this week, last week it was (James) Courtney, it's all the former SBR drivers that are attacking me for some reason. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t have done anything to avoid it. I felt I drove a good race today, we were struggling with a lot of understeer, which made overtaking difficult, but we still came through the pack and it would have been a good recovery. It’s disappointing because when you look at the results, the people that I am battling against (for a place in the championship top 10) I was in front of. The last few race meetings have been so disappointing but we're still in ninth going into Homebush.”

What IRWIN Racing’s engineer Dan Kroehn had to say:

“It was a top ten result lost. We worked pretty hard after qualifying to turn our form around. We got ourselves into a really good position in those second and third stints of the race. Alex had really good pace and his tyres were hanging on really well. We worked our way to the top 10 and then got caught up in an incident that was no fault of Alex’s. Alex hung in there and fought back, which was great. We lost a bit of ground to the guys sitting behind us in the championship, but we'll take our confidence to Sydney and make sure we consolidate our ninth position in the series.”