Heimgartner finishes 7th on the streets of Surfers Paradise

Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner has led the Albury quartet home in what was a brutal test on the streets of Surfers Paradise.

The R&J Battery Camaro driver qualified 8th, and had momentum in the race but found it difficult to move past those ahead. 

Heimgartner was given a 5 second penalty for exceeding track limits with five laps to go and wasn’t able to keep his advantage over the cars behind, and while he came across the line in 6th, was demoted to 7th.

Team-mate Bryce Fullwood started from 12th on the grid and was hopeful over a speedy race car, however very early on his crew realised there was an issue.

His engine temperature was running very high and while there were attempts made to solve the issue, which also put him down multiple laps, it was never resolved.

The team will assess the damage to the engine overnight to see if the Middy’s Electrical Camaro damaged the head gasket during the race.

Jack Smith was sidelined with a car failure of his own, while coming into his first stop the car shut off and while the crew got him going again there was an obvious issue.

They decided to change the battery in the garage but ultimately found that the alternator was the actual problem and there wasn’t enough time to make that fix and rejoin the race.

It was decided to retire the SCT Logistics car before half race distance.

Pizza Hut Racing’s Macauley Jones made his way forward over the 85 lap race.

Having qualified the #96 Camaro in 19th, Jones was able to get to 16th before getting stuck in traffic and unable to pass those ahead, something that a lot of drivers experienced on the tight street track.

The field resets tomorrow with qualifying and another 250km race, BJR will be on track from 10:05 AEST.

Supercars Quoteboard

Andre Heimgartner
Supercars Driver, #8 R&J Batteries Camaro
"Solid day, ended up P7.  So good points and not too bad. The car is pretty speedy in the race just need to qualify a bit further up. Yeah, just look forward to having another solid day tomorrow and finish off the weekend strongly."

Bryce Fullwood
Supercars Driver, #14 Middy's Electrical Camaro
"I look really unfortunate day for us here today, we qualified quite strong in 12th. Got a decent start and was just pretty happy with where we were at and what we were doing.. And then we've had some kind of some kind of engine failure. I'm not exactly sure. We're not exactly sure what the problem was. But the engine overheated very, very early in the race, which is quite abnormal for these cars. We had to limp through the whole race and we had to pit quite a few times  to put water in it and to try and do what we could to fix it. And unfortunately, we weren't able to weren't able to fix it. But thankfully, I was able to still be classified as a finisher and get some points. And we ended up 22nd. So it's a real shame. I feel like we have good speed in the car this weekend and just a little bit of luck to go our way and I think we'll be right so looking forward to tomorrow."

Jack Smith
Supercars Driver, #4 SCT Logistics Camaro
"Tough day today. Qualifying didn't go to plan. Didn't get enough speed out of the session and made it hard. Ultimately the issues in the race, we couldn't couldn't get the issues fixed in time and ran out of time. We didn't finish the race which is disappointing. Hopefully we can find out exactly what all all the problems were and and be fine tomorrow."

Macauley Jones
Supercars Driver, #96 Pizza Hut Camaro
"Qualifying wasn't too bad. I felt like I couldn't quite maximize it. I think there was a bit left on the table there. It's always a hard one to really nail this place with the kerb hops and the concrete walls everywhere. We move forward in the race, which was good. I think race pace is pretty solid. Traffic was pretty hard to manage, the tyre life for the first and for the second and third stint was quite strong."