12 July 2010

This weekend's Sucrogen Townsville 400 proved to be a tough event for Dean Fiore and his Triple F Racing crew, with a struggle for pace throughout Saturday and an incident on cold tyres on Sunday denying the team a top 15 finish.

Dean had a hard time getting pace out of the car on Saturday, qualifying in 22^nd position despite only a second separating him from 1^st in that session. In the first of the 72 lap races around the Townsville circuit, Dean struggled with average race pace throughout but managed to finish in 20^th position.

With a few areas to be worked on, Dean was confident that he and the team could move forward on Sunday. However, a small mistake in a couple of breaking areas in qualifying cost him 3 tenths of a second which would've put him in 16^th position, but instead resulted in 27^th position to start Sunday's race.

Dean managed to get his FG Falcon up into 13^th position in Sunday's race, before an incident on cold tyres forced him into the wall which resulted in him having to pit again and going down 2 laps.

"I am disappointed for the team, as we wanted a strong result leading into the long break. 5 other guys made the same mistake on cold tyres, but there were also 24 other drivers that didn't.

"The last 5 laps of Sunday's race we were lapping around the same times as the leaders, which was encouraging and I feel we left on the right note in terms of car speed," Dean said.

The V8 Supercars now have a 9 week mid season break, before they head to Phillip Island for the first of the Endurance rounds on September 10-12.