Having recently completed his limited testing program prior to the commencement of the 2010 season, Nick Percat was looking forward to the home town challenges of the Fujitsu Series first round at the Clipsal 500 Adelaide.
Practice and Qualifying were held over Thursday and Friday in warm conditions with Percat ending the Friday morning Practice session with a respectable time of 1.24.0 which would have placed him 7th in the main game practice session which took place at 11am.
Qualifying turned out to be a bit of a struggle for Percat, after such a strong debut in the practice sessions his hopes were high for a fast lap around the streets of Adelaide, however 8th was all that was possible as Nick explains. "I am a little disappointed to be honest, as I was blocked really badly on both my new tyre runs, and it also looks like we may have had a component failure on the car which has slowed us down too, however we will press on and see if we can recover to where we think we should be running"
Race 1 was held in the cooling evening of Friday, with long shadows, and the sun to contend with it was going to be a challenge for all drivers over the 24 lap distance. Percat starting from 8th on the grid got an amazing start to bolt to 4th before the first corner! With 8 laps completed he started to come under fire from the cars behind and was run a little wide on one corner dropping two places.
Percat stuck to his race plan of managing his tyre wear, and maintaining a consistent lap time and it paid off with 4 laps to go with Blanchard and Russell taking each other out at the top of Wakefield St, with Nick through to 4th place.
"Pretty happy with 4th, for me that's like a win in this car, as it doesn't have the car pace of the 2008-2009 generation cars I am battling with so to finish this high in my first race is great!" said Nick on returning to the garage.
Race 2 was always going to be a tough task having done so well in Race 1, undeterred Percat set about working on his race plan "We had the day free of racing on Saturday, which was quite good for us as it gave us a chance to work on the car and make some more changes prior to Sunday's race" said Percat.
Having made such a great start in race 1, everyone was looking to see if Percat could pull off another blinder in only his second V8 start!... Which he duly did, charging into the Senna Chicane in 3rd place and within reach of the leaders.
However it wasn't to last, as a brash move by the 999 car saw Percat take on some minor damage, to of all things the right hand mirror, which was loose but not completely off the car and a black flag resulted. With the mirror removed, Percat set about improving on his lowly 14th place, and pushed as hard as he dared scything through the field in the remaining laps moving up to 10th before the finish.
"One of those things really, it's just a shame for all the guys and the team that we couldn't have held onto that 3rd place, which was looking on the cards today. However we are 5th in the championship currently and that gives me a sniff of what we might be able to achieve in the future" Said Percat.
Nick would like to thank the sponsors that came onboard for Round 1 of his 2010 Fujitsu Series Campaign:
SIP'N SAVE
COOPERS CLEAR
ALUCO WINDOWS
Also his long standing sponsors in:
WALKINSHAW PERFORMANCE
PERCAT AUTOMOTIVE
REVOLUTION RACEGEAR
Nick Percat still has sponsorship opportunities for the remaining races of the 2010 series see http://www.nickpercat.com/ for contact details.
