Van Gisbergen first around the Bend
Kiwi driver’s experience on new track gives him a slight head start
Kiwi racer Shane van Gisbergen heads to this weekend’s round of the Supercars Championship with a small advantage over many of his rivals, including fellow Kiwi and championship contender Scott McLaughlin.
The Bend Motorsport Park 100km southeast of Adelaide will make its debut in the series and most drivers will be learning the track on the run. But van Gisbergen competed there earlier in the season while driving a GT car and will take some of that knowledge into his Supercars assignment.
“It’s a bit of an advantage, but the field is so good, all the other drivers will be on it by the end of the first session. But it will be nice to get that little head start and hopefully we can tune the car up a lot quicker for it,” the 2016 title winner told Radio Sport.
“[Racing a GT car rather than a V8] is a fair bit different but I learnt about the surface and the types of corners and how they will hold up on tyres and things like that, so a fair bit of knowledge, and that helps us prepare the cars with the types of set-ups we think will work on a track like that.
“It is pretty much business as usual but thankfully we are back to our standard format and we have three practices, I think, so that is more time than usual, so we have time to learn the track.”
The Bend track serves as the last sprint round before the championship moves to endurance mode and McLaughlin and van Gisbergen hold a significant but not unassailable lead at the top the standings.
Red Bull Holden racer van Gisbergen has won three of the last four races in the championship to move to 2490 points, just 89 behind McLaughlin. Jamie Whincup is third on 2146.
“It has been going well,” van Gisbergen said of his team’s improvement in recent rounds. “The championship battle is close but pretty awesome every week.
“I think we’re just slowly starting to understand our new ZB Commodore a bit. We had a really good start to the season and they struggled on the open and flowing tracks and that’s what we’ve got this weekend.
“Hopefully we see the improvement we’ve done and we can keep that momentum going.”