Nick Percat Preview Round 2 

Hey everyone,

After a brutal opening event to the year, it was great to get back to the WAU base and go over what we did well and the things we could have done better. Personally, I thought the car speed was there, but my performance Sunday was not good enough. So I have been very keen to get back behind the wheel of car 2 and make up for the poor SMP Sunday!

The lead up to this weekend has been great, I have been back home on the Gold Coast and back into my routine with training etc which has been nice. I’ve also spent more time with my engineer Geoff to continue to build on our relationship and help him understand what I like from the car.

The Symmons plains layout is a very short circuit but extremely hard to be fast at. On paper it looks easy, 3 corners… how hard could that be!? But what people don’t realise is it is one of the hardest places to be fast at. The layout is tricky with a tough turns 1 /2. Flowing the correct amount of speed over the rise into turn 1 is one of the hardest things to get right. I guess the hardest corner on the track has to be the hairpin which is also the slowest corner on the calendar, we are back to 1^st gear and what feels like 25kmh. Getting the hairpin correct is what makes or breaks your lap-time. You need to be very good on the brakes but also have a car that turns extremely well. Its one of the most challenging corners we face throughout the year.

This weekends format is the sprint round style. It’s a 2 day event and all run at a rapid rate with minimal turn around time between sessions. We have the knock out style of qualifying sessions back, which means you need to be absolutely on it for qualifying 1 to make sure you aren’t knocked out in the bottom 4 cars. The goal for me is to make Q3 each session and give myself a shot in the final top 10 phase. We also have to contend with the super soft tyre. A tyre which we have minimal experience on, so we might see a little shake up in the order this weekend. We expect this tyre to have a lot of degradation in the races which should make it action packed!

For me this weekend is all about continuing to learn the package, making sure I bank good points for myself and the team. There is one thing that’s for sure, you can not rush it. I need to make sure I am taking it all in, being patient and when the moment comes I can jump at it and chase my first win or podium with WAU.

As usual you can tune into the coverage on Fox Sports 506 and catch up with how I am going across my social media pages!

Cheers Nick