Tough Sandown 500 qualifying for BJR

Sandown 500 qualifying leaves the Brad Jones Racing team hungry for more come race day.

The four BJR entrants didn’t progress past the first qualifying stage on Saturday, with the warmer track temperatures not playing into the setup of their Camaros.

Andre Heimgartner in the R&J Batteries car will lead the squad out of 15th in tomorrow’s 500km race.

SCT Logistics’ Jack Smith will line up 22nd, with Macauley Jones in the Pizza Hut entry just behind in 24th.

Beside Jones will be Bryce Fullwood in the Middy’s Electrical Camaro, firing out of 25th.

While the team is disappointed with the results from qualifying, there are positives to take from the weekend so far.

Practice pace during longer and on used tyre runs has been quite good and the crew believe that that will be useful over the 161 laps on Sunday.

The team will dig in overnight to try and maximise where they can to move up the order tomorrow.

Drivers get a chance to test the track tomorrow before the race with a warm-up session scheduled for 10:10am AEST with the main event at 14:15.

Super2
Lochie Dalton in the AWC  ZB Commodore was able to make the most of an equally tough day.

Dalton was caught out by a red flag on his green tyre run in qualifying and was bogged back in the pack for their first race of the weekend.

He had an unfortunate start but pace came back to him in the latter stages of the race, finding himself with quite a quick car.

The Tasmanian looks to come back stronger tomorrow for their second hit-out at 12:50pm AEST, with qualifying for that race earlier in the morning (9:40am).
Thank you very much.

Supercars Quoteboard

Andre Heimgartner
Supercars Driver, #8 R&J Batteries Camaro
"Bit of a frustrating day butthere's a long race tomorrow. So we'll try and turn it around. It doesn't really matter too much where you qualify. So it's a mixed grid. We'll just try and make some smart moves tomorrow and finish as high up as we can."

Bryce Fullwood
Supercars Driver, #14 Middy's Electrical Camaro
"Quali certainly didn't work out too well for us. Not super pleased with that. I feel like we've got a fair bit more than where we're starting. But looking on to tomorrow, we have a 500km race. Dean (Fiore) did some pretty good race running. I feel like we compromised our weekend to do a fair bit of race running. So hoping that really pays off for us tomorrow and I know that this race has been won from last before. So you know, if the car is good then there's no reason why we can't punch our way up the front, which is certainly going to be our goal."

Jack Smith
Supercars Driver, #14 SCT Logistics Camaro
"Qualifying was an interesting session. We found a lot of speed in the car abut unfortunately so did the rest, the field is and super super close. We had good gains but we only ended up 22nd which is disappointing. But it's a 500km race tomorrow and if we've got good race pace we can get a good result. So we're not so worried focusing on tomorrow."

Macauley Jones
Supercars Driver, #96 Pizza Hut Camaro
"We had a bit of a struggle today. We really need to reassess our qualifying speed. It feels like we really struggled obviously with the new tyre, even in practice today it was sort of a bit of struggle for us as well. We couldn't really quite make it work. But I feel like we actually have a good race car, just when we try to go that bit faster for qualifying it doesn't seem to hook up as much as what we would like. So as a group we're working pretty hard at that one. But I've been told it's a long race. And I think we will have a good race car and we have good braking. So hopefully we can pass a few cars and be there at the end of it. "

Super 2 Quoteboard

Lochie Dalton
Super 2 driver, #43 AWC ZB Commodore
"It was an average start today with quali. I think we had we had good speed, we made good changes and we had a positive start on the rotated tyre and then we didn't quite get our strategy right. The red flag interrupted us so we didn't get our green run. So we started way further back than what we probably should have. In the race, I overcooked the clutch on the start  and got a bad start then we worked our way forward. Had a little bit of a bingle at the end but we had really strong top three pace so hopefully we can take that in tomorrow."