Breakthrough Podium For Percat In V8 Shootout!

Morris Finance Sports Ambassador Nick Percat claims brilliant runner-up result in Sydney feature race

Nick Percat has broken through for a brilliant first podium finish of the 2014 V8 Supercars Championship at Sydney Motorsport Park.

The Walkinshaw Racing driver came within mere tenths of a second of claiming his first win in V8 Supercar racing’s ‘main game’ as a full-time solo driver, chasing the winning Volvo of Scott McLaughlin over the line at the end of a frantic 51-lap Sunday race.

The result was the first podium finish for Heavy Haulage Australia since it entered V8 Supercars as a naming rights sponsor last season.

It also was Percat’s first trip to a V8 Supercar Championship podium since he paired with Garth Tander to win the 2011 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 for the sister Holden Racing Team.

The South Australian qualified a brilliant third behind McLaughlin and Fabian Coulthard and was a contender throughout the 200-kilometre feature race, which featured two pit stops for fuel and the requirement to use both the hard and soft options of Dunlop tyres.

Able to create enough speed from his soft tyres without pushing them too hard, Percat saved his attack for the closing laps, slicing the margin to the leader McLaughlin and crossing the finishing line within sight of the Kiwi’s bumper.

The runner-up result means Percat is the 15th different driver in the 25-strong field to finish on the podium in this year’s highly competitive V8 Supercar Championship.

“It was a truly amazing day for me,” said Percat after a well-deserved spraying of champagne on the podium.

“To finish second in my rookie year, it’s just an awesome credit to (engineers) Alex (Somerset) and Ty (Anderson) and the whole team for making the car fast and I get the pleasure of driving it.

“You know it’s been a good race and the car has been very good when you get out feeling very fresh at the end of the day.

“Momentum is really starting to roll for us. We’re qualifying much, much better and hopefully that continues on. Qualifying in the top five regularly makes life so much easier.

“If we approached it as a ‘financial year’ championship since the start of July with Townsville, Queensland Raceway and Sydney we’d be right up there in contention!

“The whole Walkinshaw Racing group has been working hard. Pit stops had been a bit of an issue at the start of the year but we’re getting procedures in place and keeping it calm and today our stops in pit lane were awesome.”

The runner-up result was also a gutsy fight back from a tough pair of 100-kilometre sprint races on Saturday afternoon in terrible wet conditions.

Percat finished 16th and 19th in the pair of sprints, tagged into a spin by Russell Ingall in the closing stages of the latter.

The Walkinshaw driver moved up three positions in the championship over the Sydney Motorsport Park weekend and now sits 15th in the point-score, just 76 points behind 11th-placed David Reynolds.

He could easily leapfrog into the all-important top 10 in the next event, which marks the beginning of the three-round, four-race Pirtek Enduro Cup encompassing the Sandown 500, Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 and Gold Coast 600.

Percat will be joined for the endurance races by factory GM Corvette GT driver, Brit Oliver Gavin, who will make his V8 Supercar Championship debut at Sandown on September 12-14.

Gavin, who races in the Tudor United SportsCar Championship in the United States, will test the HHA Commodore prior to Sandown, where he and Percat will drive an upgraded VF Commodore chassis.