Hard work pays dividends for DJR Team Penske at Winton SuperSprint
May 17, 2015
Winton, Victoria, 17.05.15: DJR Team Penske has scored its best result of 2015 with a hard fought eighth place in the 200km final race at Winton today. The day started well with Scott Pye putting the PPG / Daikin Falcon FG X into P9 on the grid. This was Pye's best qualifying so far in 2015.
The race would involve a number of tyre strategies amongst many of the leaders, however Pye and his DJR Team Penske would go with a Hard / Hard / Soft combination for the 63 lap journey. Pye started well picking up three spots on the opening lap to settle into P6. Of the leading group, Tander, Lowndes, Slade & Courtney had all chosen to start on softs, so Pye was running very strongly with the other hard tyre runners in the opening stanza.
With some early stops for the soft tyre runners starting, Scott moved the PPG / Daikin Falcon up to P4 on Lap 10, making his first stop some six laps later. A good stop by the DJR Team Penske crew saw Pye jump Winterbottom and emerge in P9. A second stint was cut short when Chaz Mostert brought out the Safety Car; his Falcon FG X sitting backwards on the tyre barriers at Turn 4.
The Safety Car forced every team to head for the pits, and for Pye it meant a move onto the Dunlop Softs albeit earlier than the crew ideally would have liked. Pye pushed on well engaging in big battles with Tander and Reynolds. The Falcon was running a very competitive race however, and held station well with the leaders.
A big lunge at Tander at Turn 9 did not pay off and as the laps ran down Scott was pushed back a few spots to finish a very credible P8. A fine performance by the whole team and the best result to date in the 2015 V8 Supercars Championship.
The team returns to Queensland with a four week break before the next round in Darwin in mid-June.
Scott Pye – No 17 PPG / Daikin DJR Team Penske Ford Falcon FG X
"A lot hard work finally came to fruition today. We have to strive to be competitive as we were today at every race and with a long break before Darwin we can really work on the positives from this weekend.
"We did a good job in qualifying and with a good car ran in the top group on merit today. On the final run it was just impossible to overtake cleanly, so we had to run in that pack and in the final few laps just ran out of rear tyres and dropped a couple of spots.
"I am really happy with the weekend and full credit to the engineers. They made some great calls today and we were on the attack all day. You just have to capitalise when the car is good and we did that today."