Hard off-season pays off for Cam Waters
Hard work during the off-season has paid off for Supercars driver Cam Waters, according to his Prodrive Racing Australia team boss Tim Edwards.
Cameron Waters, Prodrive Racing Australia Ford
Daniel Kalisz / Motorsport Images
Waters has made no secret of how important the 2017 season is in terms of his development, the 2015 Super2 champion wanting to make a splash in what is his second year as a full-time main gamer.
In a bid to improve his on-track performance, Waters spent the off-season working with renowned driver coach Rob Wilson in the UK, as well as a more intense fitness regime.
The early signs are that the hard work has paid off, Waters taking an impressive fourth place from Saturday’s first race in Adelaide despite immense pressure from Rick Kelly, backing that up with a solid eighth on Sunday.
According to PRA boss Edwards, the improved form is a combination of Waters’s hard work during the break, and PRA’s engineering shake-up, which has seen the Monster-backed driver paired with engineer Brad Wischusen.
“He has put in the hard yards and he has done a lot to improve himself,” said Edwards.
“We have worked with him on that, and we’ve tried to marry that up with making sure that we can deliver, whether it’s people around him that fit with him, whether it’s improving deficiencies with the car.
“It has been a shared responsibility to improve him and that is what he needed.
“He had 30 laps under pressure on Saturday, but he managed to close the gap to the two in front. He drove really well, and he was driving smart; any time you see somebody backing them up into the corner, and getting the drive out, that was a mature drive.
“It’s great. He will earn respect from the other drivers driving like that. If they think they can pick on you, they will. You’ve got to establish yourself and say ‘I’ve got elbows too’.
“The whole weekend he ticked all the boxes. He did a solid job.”
Waters added that the Clipsal weekend was exactly what he was looking for to kick-start the 2017 season.
“To come out and be consistently inside the Top 10 all weekend is what I wanted,” he said.
“The fourth [on Saturday] was unreal. We can take a lot of momentum out of this.
“Across the weekend we made the car better and better. My new engineer Brad and I are working really well together. I think that relationship and the team are only going to grow stronger across the year."
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