Lowndes to start from 10th at Winton
14/8/2004 14:58 (Press Release) -
CAT FPR Falcon driver Craig Lowndes will start tomorrow's seventh round of the 2004 Australian V8 Supercar Series from 10th on the grid following today's wet qualifying session and top ten shoot out at Victoria's Winton Raceway.
Lowndes qualified fourth in the combined session held earlier in the afternoon with his fastest lap time of 1:38.8290s. This earned the 30 year old driver a place in the water-logged top ten shootout for race starting positions. After a difficult and very slippery single lap effort, Lowndes' lap time of 1:41.2608s relegated him to 7th.
Following the shoot out, race stewards imposed a penalty to the team for a technical infringement deemed not be a performance advantage. This excluded Lowndes' shoot out lap time, relegating the CAT FPR Falcon driver to 10th.
The day wasn't as encouraging for Ford Credit FPV Falcon driver Glenn Seton.
The double Champion was not pleased with his qualifying effort, finding the going tough with his new car in the consistently wet and tricky conditions. He will start tomorrow's 300 kilometre race from the rear of the field in 31st position. (1:41.2357s).
Winton's treacherously wet conditions produced a surprise Polesetter, with Holden driver Craig Baird taking the top spot ahead of Garth Tander (Holden), Steven Johnson (Ford) and Championship leader Marcos Ambrose (Ford).
#6 Craig Lowndes - "We know that the car has always been good in the wet and we made some changes today that have further improved it. The main problem was that the wet track grip levels kept changing and the major challenge was to adapt to these changes and stay with it - we managed to do that today. It was hard to do one fast lap in these conditions during the shoot out. I made a couple of errors as well that didn't help our cause. It is a credit to all of the top ten drivers that they got through the shootout without any accidents.
If it is a wet race tomorrow, we are in strong form for it."
#5 Glenn Seton - "I can't really blame the car - to put it simply I just didn't get the job done today. Both FPR Falcons are very similar and I was way off the pace - I look forward to making amends in the race tomorrow."
FPR Chief Engineer, John Russell - "Good effort by the team, Glenn had a diffiicult afternoon, but we will be working on a number of changes to help him for the race. Craig had a very solid day, fourth in qualifying was a very good achievement. 7th was a good effort considering how we started the weekend, but we'll be doing our best from 10th tomorrow."
FPR returns to the track tomorrow morning at 10:10am for a twenty minute warm up with the 100 lap race scheduled to start at 1:00pm.
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