Will still confident of toppling giants
“A FEW times my car has felt absolutely awesome and you still are not quite able to touch them.”
In one sentence alone, Will Davison summed up the frustrations of the Supercars squads trying to take the fight to cashed-up powerhouses DJR Team Penske and the Red Bull Holden Racing Team.
The rival outfits wholly make up the top four in the championship standings: Scott McLaughlin, Jamie Whincup, Fabian Coulthard and Shane van Gisbergen.
Underpinned by big budgets, they are leading the category’s development race to dominate the grid week in, week out.
Such is their advantage that even when other cars such as Davison’s No.19 Commodore do an outstanding job, the series’ big four still zoom past and set off into the distance.
That scenario has forced the likes of the 2009 championship runner-up and his small Tekno Autosports team to take excessive risks in a bid to bridge the gap, which has sometimes had an adverse effect.
“Everyone is being forced
to spend more and develop more and as a single-car team with a smaller budget, it’s been tricky,” Davison said.
“If we get everything right, we’re in that top five there.
“We have just been a bit hit and miss probably trying too hard and I think probably a lot of people are guilty of that. If you make one small mistake now, you get punished for it really heavily.
“Unfortunately we would like to just keep doing what we were doing last year (when he placed fifth overall) but it just doesn’t cut it so then you go searching and sometimes to go forwards, you have got to take a step backwards first.”
Davison is 13th in the standings after a particularly testing, incident-filled start to the season.
Nonetheless, he believes it is possible to beat the frontrunners to achieve podiums and even a win before the season is up – with the three-event endurance swing offering a sound opportunity, given he and team boss Jonathon Webb placed second in last year’s Enduro Cup.
Davison’s contract expires this year and while he is eager to soon pen an extension with the Yatala team, plenty is “up in the air”.
“Your No.1 plan is continuity but you need a lot of stars to align, particularly in a small team,” he said.
“So they need to lock some things away, sponsorship and all these things are important … it’s not as simple as with big teams that can possibly lock drivers in before sponsorship.”