Le Brocq and Tickford Hit the Streets of Townsville

With only one week turn around before the next event the Tickford team hit the road for the 2,500 Km journey from Darwin to Townsville in Far North Queensland for the next Double Header in the Supercars championship. This meant the team had little time to prepare the Tickford cars, but all their rivals in the Championship faced the same challenges. Before the Race Jack shared his thoughts on the track “Townsville’s a fun track, it’s pretty tricky and technical and usually puts on good racing. Obviously, last weekend didn’t look too flash from a results perspective, but I think we made a good step forward on the Supercheap Auto Mustang in race trim, hopefully, we can continue that this weekend and qualify a bit better to get us closer to the front and put together a good round for the team.”

The action started on Saturday with Le Brocq’s Mustang supported by Bendix heading out for the two practice sessions before qualifying, where Jack set a credible time in the first session which was 7th fastest with a 1m12.95 lap but only improved marginally in the second practice session. Qualifying did not go to plan with no time set by the No.55 Mustang after his steering clevis failed, precluding him from completing a lap and forcing him to start from the rear of the field. “I’m not totally sure what happened said Jack, I must have just come off a kerb the wrong way, I suppose. I don’t really know what happened, it obviously set us back which was a bit frustrating, but the boys got it fixed up and the car was decent in the Race, so we’ll keep working at it for tomorrow.”

When the lights went out for Race 19 of the Championship Le Brocq had a decent start but then got caught up in a big accident at Turn 2 that saw almost half the field have contact and several cars stuck in the fence including Le Brocq. Once Jack got going again, he began a fightback climbing his way to 15th at the chequered flag, he gave us his thoughts post-race “We survived the day, we got stuck at the start with the carnage at Turn 2, I just avoided that but lost a heap of time, so we mainly just circulated today. We only took two tyres at the stop and the car felt all right, so I think if we have a good qualifying effort tomorrow, with a couple extra tyres in our pocket it’ll be a good day.”

The first qualifying for Sunday saw Jack post a 1m12.53s, putting him 8th on the grid for race 20 of the Championship and he backed this up with an 11th place on the grid for the final Race of the weekend. It was a relatively quiet pair of races for Sunday, with Jack using fresh rubber and thanks to a later pit finished Races 20 and 21 unscathed, ending the weekend with 12th and 16th place finishes.

Jack gave us his thoughts on Sunday’s action, “I think qualifying was good, good for myself, we had good speed and the times were close so it was good to be in that group, so I’m pretty happy with that. In the races, I had an awful start to the first Race today, and dropped seven spots by Turn 1, which obviously hurt, and we struggled a bit with rear tyre life. We came 12th in the first Race and had good tyres at the end of the second but just got stuck behind people and couldn’t make much headway. Not how we wanted the day to go, but we’ll take the positives from it and see what we can learn and apply for next week.”

Team Principal Tim Edwards reflected on the weekend, “ From a team perspective it was a very well executed weekend. There’s no doubt some speed to be found in some of our cars, but we have momentum as a team we can ride into the last round of this four week stretch.”

The teams and Supercars Championship are set to stay at the circuit prepare the cars and do it all again on the second leg of the Townsville Double Header next weekend with Jack sitting 15th in the Championship.