Highs and Lows in Darwin for Nissan Motorsport

The ACS Nissan Motorsport team have experienced a weekend of highs and lows at round 6 of the Supercars Championship held in Darwin. The weekend started out well for Nissan with Rick Kelly topping the time sheets in practise one and then following this up with a pole position in qualifying. Sadly, Kelly suffered from a stuck throttle which resulted in him crashing at turn 11. The team was able to turn the car around overnight to have him finish Sunday’s race in 10th position.

The ACS sponsored cars of Michael Caruso and Simona De Silvestro both suffered from contact but managed to finish race 11 finishing in 16th and 20th position respectively. In Sunday’s race, De Silvestro started in 24th position and quickly made up places to move into 20th position by lap 3. Sadly De Silvestro suffered from a stall in pit lane and contact with a competitor which resulted in her crossing the line in 28th place. Caruso started Sundays race from 15th place, however the 2016 Darwin race winner struggled with set-up issues throughout the race, dropping him back to finish in 19th place.

Michael Caruso - #23 Nissan NISMO - 19th
"It’s been a disappointing weekend, particularly after coming back after our success last year. It just goes to show the importance of a good car at this place. Without the machine working right, it’s hard to move much further up than 19th. Hopefully, we can turn it around. Townsville is the next event and one the whole team looks forward to."

Simona De Silvestro - #78 Team Harvey Norman - 25th (28th)
"Darwin is a cool place but not the race weekend we wanted. It’s been a tough one, so I’m keen to move onto the next round. We had some issues in the pitstops. I stalled in the first stop, and we put heaps of fuel in the second. So that killed us. So there’s a lot of little things that still need to come together. It seems like our pace was close to the other Nissans, so we should have finished closer to them.”