SUNDAY'S class race victory for Brad Schumacher in the fourth round of the GT World challenge Australia series was a reward for the changes he and his team made throughout a tough Sydney SuperNight event.
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Things had been working against Schumacher's favour in the lead up to the round, with a delayed gearbox delivery seeing him miss the test day a week earlier and depriving him of a chance to get a first look at the Sydney Motorsport Park circuit since its resurfacing two years ago.
After a pair of tough Friday qualifying sessions, where the team got to grips with both the car and the road, they were able to finish second in the GT Amateur class and ninth overall in Saturday's opening race.
That result left the Schumacher Motorsport garage with plenty of work to do after they were nearly 20 seconds off the Matt Stoupas and Paul Stokell class-winning entry.
The team returned the next day with a flawless performance in race two, climbing up to sixth overall and a race win in their class - and as the only GT Am entry to finish on the lead lap.
Those combined results gave Schumacher and his #55 Audi R8 LMS entry the round win.
Schumacher said all wins are special to him, but especially those that come after overcoming a series of obstacles.
"We missed the sanctioned test day last week, which everyone else made it to, due to our gearbox not getting back from Germany in time, so we were behind the 8-ball heading into practice,
"We hadn't been back to Sydney for a couple of years now since it had been resurfaced, so you've got parts of the surfaced that are resurfaced and fully gripped up while you've got the older sections that are really erasing on the tyres, so it was tough to get a good balance with the car before qualifying.
"That showed in our qualifying pace, which wasn't that great, and we lacked rear grip in race one. In the last 10 laps of the race there wasn't anything left in the rears tyres and I was able to only just hold off Garth Walden. If there was one more lap I wouldn't be able to keep him at bay.
"We made some changes and on Sunday the car was as good as it had been the whole weekend, and that's a big credit to our guys at Schumacher Motorsport to produce a car that was on rails for Sunday's race. I'm just super stoked that we could take another round win."
Four tenths of a second separated Schumacher and Walden after more than an hour's worth of racing.
That tense battle and race data gave the team the valuable information they needed to make the right tweaks for race two, and the results of that work were there for all their rivals to see by the end of race two.
Schumacher said it was fascinating to experience the SMP circuit in a whole new way after some time away from the track.
"It was chalk and cheese compared to when we were last here in the older specification Audi," he said.
"For example, the surface resurfacing through turn one is super fast, and I had to almost rewire my brain to tell my body that the car was capable of doing what it could do through that turn.
"In the past, in the old car, you'd be braking from about 100m out and going back to fifth gear through the turn at around 225 kilometres an hour.
"Now with the current spec Audi, the aero package and the resurfacing there's no braking, a slight lift of the throttle, turn it around back on full throttle and we're doing nearly 260 km/h through there now, which is just insane.
"It's unbelievable that the machines can even do something like that. Over the course of the weekend we finally got there and we were eventually do similar lap times to the pros."
The results see Schumacher move to 186 points at the top of the GT Am standings, giving him extra breathing room over the Stoupas-Stokell entry (145) in what's now effectively a two-horse battle for the championship.
It's a quick turnaround for the next round of the series at Queensland Raceway on August 11-13.
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