Nick Percat Townsville 500 Preview 

Hey everyone,

This weekend we are in Townsville for the next round. This weekend is an exciting weekend for me, it’s the place where I won in Super2, scored my first Supercars pole position in 2020 and the event is proudly backed by NTI. It’s going to be a very busy week on the lead into actually driving the car. Being an NTI round meant I arrived in Townsville on the Tuesday and got stuck straight into media commitments.

I was lucky enough to drive a special truck in the truck parade, The Ford truck was built by NTI and certainly caught the eyes of everyone as we lead the truck parade around Townsville on Wednesday morning.

This weekend we are back to the traditional long races, which I think everyone is excited for! We have 2 practice sessions on Friday followed by Qualifying, a top 10 shoot out and a 250km race on Saturday and Sunday. The best thing about the longer format weekends is it gives the drivers and teams creative freedom with the strategy as we will be refuelling the cars during the race. This makes it a lot more interesting for the fans watching as generally the race is wide open until the last pitstop and we all pop out in different positions and charge home to the finish.

Personally, I love the longer races. Firstly, there is the strategy aspect of the race, but there is also the physical and mental side to it from the driver’s seat. Townsville is a tough street track which is physically demanding across the kerbs and bumps. The 250km race is mentally draining and by the last stint of the race its all about minimising the mistakes.

Supercars have also mixed it up a little, this weekend we are racing on the hard tyre compound but to spice it up, we get 1 set of new Super soft tyres for each race. We can’t drive on these tyres during practice, the first time they will be fitted to the car is in the race. We need to use both compounds of tyres during each race and its up to the teams when we run the super soft tyre. So, this should defiantly create exciting racing and strategy!

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