Words with Cam Waters: Learning the hard way

There’s no getting around it, Sydney Motorsport Park wasn’t a good weekend for car #6. It actually wasn’t a great weekend for Prodrive Racing Australia as a whole; Chaz Mostert did a great job, but the other three cars couldn’t have that much of an impact on the weekend.

I think it all boiled down to set-up. Early in the weekend we were making changes, but it wasn’t really helping.

I said in my column last week that set-up would be crucial in Sydney, because you simply can’t drive around the car if it isn’t working for you. And that was the story of the weekend for us. We did actually find the set-up, but then I had to learn how to drive to it – and by that stage it was way too late in the weekend to do anything meaningful.

The lack of grip didn’t play into our hands, either. The track was a lot different to last year, although in parts it had been resurfaced. So it made it quite weird to drive on, because you would go from an old part of the circuit, on to a grippy bit, and then back to having no grip again.

If I’m honest, that caught me a bit off guard. I just didn’t quite get there, in terms of figuring it all out.

It was a tough weekend for me. But, given it’s my rookie year, I need to take positives from everything – and in this case I genuinely learnt a lot across what was a tough weekend. The upswing is that it will help me put better processes in place, so that I can be more consistent in the future.

In terms of looking to consolidate what we learnt at our recent test day, we never really got that chance in Sydney. The surface just didn’t give us that opportunity; we’d come in during practice, make a change to the car, and then go back out and be four tenths slower because the tyre had degraded so much.

The things we worked on at the test, it will probably suit other tracks more than it would ever suit Sydney Motorsport Park. And we have another test next Tuesday, our pre-enduro test, so we’ll get to try even more stuff there.