Bowe makes amends at Oran Park
16/8/2004 12:15 (Press Release) -
A brilliant drive in the first race by BJR’s John Bowe has set the Tasmanian up for a respectable round result at the completion of today’s action of the V8 Supercars at Sydney’s Oran Park Raceway.
After being forced to start at the rear of the grid due to missing a random car weigh-in yesterday, Bowe made up an amazing twenty three places in the opening race to storm home in 12th and setting up a solid position for the second and final encounter.
“Everything went to plan for us in race one. The car was working really well and we had a great pit stop. I think our lap times at the end of the race were as good if not better than the leaders,” said Bowe.
Starting from the sixth row in race two, Bowe had maintained his position heading into the pit stop window but the combination of an on-track incident and a lack of tyre performance, saw him unable to repeat his first race effort, finishing in 18th.
“I just couldn’t seem to get the same sort of grip from the second set of tyres as I did in the first race. I could feel that the balance of the car was still there but no grip. And when I was punted off by Glenn Seton, there wasn’t much hope of getting a good result.”
Bowe managed to secure a valuable 108 championship points, giving him 14th position overall for the weekend and a sense of relief from what could have been a far worse situation.
Brad Jones was left wondering when his run of luck would improve. A stray tyre in pit lane from a neighbouring team cost him four places during the frantic pit stop foray in the opening race and the loss of a cylinder in race two resulted in the team boss being forced to stumble over finish line in last place.
“I’m not going to begin to explain how disappointed I am. We performed much better than our result of 21st in the first race. Being held up in the pit bay whilst the next team moved their tyre was very, very costly,” said Jones.
“We’re still not sure what happened to the engine in race two but with 8 laps to go I lost power and it dropped to seven cylinders. I was comfortably in 15th at the time but I had to do exactly the same thing as Winton and sit and wait for the leader to cross the line, then idle over to record a finish.”
“It’s bloody frustrating,” Jones concluded.
|
|
