Heimgartner tops pre-season test day

Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner set the fastest time in Supercars’ pre-season test day at Sydney Motorsport Park, as the Chevrolet Camaros outpaced the Ford Mustangs in the first full-field outing for the new Gen3 cars. 

Will Brown, Brodie Kostecki, Macauley Jones, Jack Smith, Bryce Fullwood, Shane van Gisbergen, Mark Winterbottom, Todd Hazelwood and Brock Feeney were in the top 10, with Hazelwood the fastest Mustang in ninth place.

However, with mixed conditions across the day and not all entries running on the faster soft tyres, the times weren’t a true indication of outright pace. 

“It’s obviously very different as we all know, with areo and stuff but I think over one lap actually not completely different, there are some slight differences as far as how the car moves around a lot more on the tyre but I think we’ll see the biggest difference is once you get past one or two laps, this car uses a tyre lot harder,” said Heimgartner.

“So it’s actually quite interesting especially here at SMP when the degradation is quite high. So it’s going to be good racing and yeah, it’s anyone’s guess how new cars will go.

“So we had more of a systems check and then today had more (tyres) saved up so for sure we chucked some good tyres at it and it was as the timesheets say we ended up at the top which is good so you don’t really know 100% until we get to the round obviously people play games, you know, they don’t show the hand as as it always is. So yeah, we’ll see when we get to Newcastle.”