MOSTERT CLAIMS WIN IN PRODRIVE 1-2 FINISH

PRODRIVE RACING – PHILLIP ISLAND 500 SUNDAY WRAP
Prodrive Racing (Australia)’s Chaz Mostert has taken his first win since August 2015 in race six at the Phillip Island 500. He and Mark Winterbottom took home a one-two finish in an impressive race, holding on to their tyres in a final stint of over 30 laps. Chaz Mostert now sits third in the championship after taking the win by over four seconds while his rivals finished down the field. Both Mostert and Winterbottom credited their engineers for the results with work done overnight to prevent any further tyre punctures this weekend. Cameron Waters was able to recover from 20th position to finish sixth after being forced to stack twice in pit stops under the safety car. A crew error also brought Waters into the pits for an additional stop, however Waters was pleased with his pace, confident that if the error had have been avoided he could have finished even further up the field. Jason Bright endured another tough day after being run off the track on the exit of turn two and sustaining further damage at turn one a lap later. Repairs in pit lane pushed him seven laps behind the front of the field to finish 25th.

DRIVERS’ VIEW
Mark Winterbottom – #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 4th – 1m29.67s
Race 6: 2nd
“It was a really good race. To get back on the podium is really cool and obviously you always want to win but to do it behind a teammate is the next best scenario. I’m really happy with it. It’s good for my confidence and good for Brendan (Hogan) my engineer’s confidence because the first couple of rounds have been horrible. It’s good to have confidence knowing we’re going the right direction. We were competitive today. We tuned the car up, the engineers did all of the work to take the load off the tyre so it’s good that it was still fast enough and safe which is pretty hard to do so they did a good job. It was good to finish trouble-free.”Cameron Waters – #6 Monster Energy PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 5th – 1m29.70s
Race 6: 6th
“It was an okay day in the end. Qualifying was really good. I left a couple of tenths on the table with a little mistake so it was good to be fifth. The race was going okay until I had to double stack. I went back to 20th so it was really good to salvage sixth and get some more points and have a straight car. We’re continuing to learn so I’m really excited to get to Perth now and give it a crack there.”

Chaz Mostert – #55 Supercheap Auto PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 6th – 1m29.72s
Race 6: 1st
“Super pumped to finally get the race win in a championship race. Now we just have to go back to the workshop and work even harder. We have to assess what worked with the car today and what didn’t work with the car and try and make it better. Super pumped this weekend after yesterday blowing two tyres to come into today. The win was really from the engineers from the way they turned the car upside down to look after the tyres was pretty big. Big congratulations to the whole team but in saying that now we got one win we obviously want some more so we’ll keep chipping away.”

Jason Bright – #56 MEGA Bulk Fuels PRA Ford:
Qualifying: 14th – 1m30.18s
Race 6: 25th
“Today wasn’t ideal for us. I felt that we had a car that wasn’t too bad going into the race and from 14th I think we could have been competitive but it wasn’t to be. I got hit in the left rear going around turn two and was speared off the outside of the corner. After the safety car restart I ran off at turn one and sustained more damage so we had to pit for repairs and that was our day done from there. It’ll be good to go to Perth, take what we’ve learnt here and see if we can improve further.”

Tim Edwards – Team Principal:
“It’s fantastic. The team did a lot of work overnight to get the cars to look after their tyres and we saw today that it worked. It was a team effort, it’s a credit to our group who have all done a great amount of work to get us here and prove that we’re still in the mix.  What we learnt today will undoubtedly help us in Perth so while it’s great to get the win our focus now turns to the next event and how we can keep improving our cars.”

Garry Jacobson – #1 MEGA Bulk Fuels PRA Ford:
Race 4: 5th
“Really positive about going forward in today’s race. The setup direction that we went with I felt was much more competitive in terms of hanging onto its tyres and we learnt a lot this weekend as well. To wrap up the weekend with one race win and a consistent front row qualifying result as well after Tassie, I think we’re in a good position. We’ve got a lot of work to do now for Townsville for our next Super2 round but with what we’ve learnt from the last three rounds I think we can be more competitive at a street circuit.”

Josh Kean – #5 Wynns Racing PRA Ford:
Race 4: 10th
“I’m really happy to have finished in the top 10 today. We worked really hard on the setup last night and we’re getting closer to getting it right. I’m definitely more confident in the setup we had today compared to what we had earlier in the weekend. We have a test day between now and Townsville so I’m really looking forward to that just to get that bit more comfortable with the car and give us a good direction for the next event.”