Mostert rounds out the 2019 season

In November 2017 Newcastle hosted the first of its Newcastle 500 races with great success. Now in the third year of the five year contract, the exciting street circuit replaced the Coates Hire Sydney 500 and has hosted some amazing racing and boasts one of the most picturesque locations on the Supercars calendar. With 14 turns, the 2.629km long circuit shares some similarities to the sadly lost Oran Park circuit.

After coming away from the previous round at Sandown confident, Chaz Mostert headed for the final round of the 2019 Supercars Championship 5th in the standings and highest ranked at the Tickford Racing garage.

“Newcastle’s a tough track with no room for error, and with just two practices on Friday it will be re-ally important to roll out strong so we don’t spend the weekend playing catch up. I think we’ll be on it, theteam’s done a great job since Gold Coast, to run a different chassis at Sandown and get on the podium was great, so hopefully we get off to a good start this weekend and can fine tune from there and fight at the front.”

With practice taken care of, Chaz started off with a top 10 finish in 8th place in Practice 1. Yet as the times dropped, he wasn’t able to back it up in the 2nd session and could only manage to bring the No. 55 Supercheap Auto Ford Mustang home in 13th position in Practice 2 with a time of 1m10.63s. “A fair bit of work to do, just trying to understand the car. We’ve got some good things going for us, but at the same time we’re searching in other areas, so we’ll throw a few things at it overnight and see what we get from it. There are some positives in it, we just need to squeeze a bit more out of it. We’ll try harder tomorrow, see what we can learn, and go from there.”

After qualifying didn’t go as well as hoped, Chaz started Race 1 from 16th position on the grid. Admitting that it was a difficult race, he bought the No. 55 Supercheap Auto Ford Mustang home in 11th place at the end of 95 laps, securing himself 5th position in the 2019 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship. “Tough day. That was the most physical race I’ve had all year, and one of the toughest I’ve ever driven, I think. It’s a super tough track, when you just don’t have the car to hang on, it’s really physical on you. I’m happy to get back to 11th from where we started, we didn’t have a great qualifying, and yeah, 11th was probably all we had today. Hopefully we can qualify better tomorrow and put us in a better position for the race.”

Starting Race 2 in 11th position, Chaz fought hard and managed a better Sunday result on 6th in final and 32nd race. Overall he scored 2879 points in the season and helped to secure Tickford Racing third place in the Teams’ Championship. “Tough slog, we just didn’t quite have the pace this weekend. Honestly I think the strategy got us there in the end, to P6. It’s good to get a good bank of points and finish off the year fifth in the championship.

It’s pretty good to get a top five in the championship, but it was a bit up and down. The consistency hurt us a bit, and some driver mistakes through the year also sucked, but it’s awe-some to still be top five in the championship and finish the year off strong.” Having completed the 2019 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship, racing kicks off again at the Adelaide 500, February 2020.