BATHURST driver Brad Shiels enjoyed a top 10 finish in the second round of the Australian Endurance Championship at Sydney Motorsport Park on Saturday.
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Shiels and AMAC Motorsport team boss Andrew Macpherson completed 126 laps of the circuit in a time of three hours, 33 minutes, 32.365 seconds to rank 10th.
Victory belonged to Audi pair Jaxon Evans and Tim Miles, who completed 128 laps to set a new distance record for the series at 503.04 kilometres.
After Shiels and Macpherson had placed 15th in the opening round of the annual GT3 series in an new Lamborghini Huracan, they had spent time working on the car’s set up.
That included a test day at Sydney Motorsport Park prior to round two, but unfortunately the data the team gathered there did not help come Friday’s practice and qualifying sessions.
“From the test the week prior we turned up with the same set up that worked the week before,” Shiels said.
“But the car wasn’t very good and pretty much everyone in the field had complaints too – the track was really funny, it was completely different to the week before.
“There was a really, really strong wind as well at the track and that played with the aero of the car as well.”
Competitors were allocated just 20 minutes in practice, leaving little time to make adjustments before qualifying.
There were two qualifying sessions each of 20 minutes, with an average of the two quickest laps from each determining grid positions.
“I only had three laps in practice because there was only 20 minutes between the both of us in that session, so really there was no time to make too many changes,” Shiels said.
“We made a spring change in the rear, that was all we could do before qualifying. I was pretty happy with my qualy, I qualified in 11.
“It can be a little bit disheartening when you’re 11th and you’ve done the best job you can do, but when I looked at the time the top 11 were within a second of each other, it was actually really, really close.
“I was the fastest Lamborghini Huracan there, so as a gauge off that I was pretty happy.”
Shiels’ effort combined with Macpherson’s lap time saw the pair start Saturday morning’s race from 14th on the grid.
Macpherson was given the job of starting the race, but there was a crash early on which triggered a safety car period and had team officials tossing up whether or not to pit and put Shiels in the driver’s seat.
In the end they decided to leave Macpherson out on track to do his full stint, but as it unfolded he struck trouble.
Once he handed over to Shiels, the Bathurst talent also found the going tough but he managed to steer the Lamborghini home in 10th place.
“During his stint he had a little bit of a spin and just, just touched the wall coming into turn three. That lost us a bit of time until he gathered himself back up, it was okay but we lost a couple of laps there.
“Then when I got in the car the tyre pressures went up a bit during my stint, so the car lost a lot of grip and I was struggling for pace.
“We had to make another pit stop and we were trying to only do two to get us through to the end. So a few little things went wrong, but we still came out with a reasonably good result.
“It still wasn’t the perfect race, there were a few little hiccups, but it was a good result.”
Meanwhile the GT Motorsport entry that fellow Bathurst driver Grant Denyer shared with Greg Taylor, was excluded from the results for a pit lane infringement.
The next round of the series will be conducted at Hampton Downs from October 27-29.