Words with Cam Waters: Explosive end to tough weekend

Well, that was a tough weekend to say the least.

I feel like that we lost our way in practice a little bit. We were eighth quickest in Practice 2, which looks good on paper, but I really wasn’t happy with the car at all.

It’s all well and good to have a car that is quick over one lap, which is what we had on Friday, but you need a car that can do a whole race.

I was worried we were just going to fry tyres when we went racing, so we had to react to that.

We made a few changes on Friday night, and the car felt better on Saturday… but obviously it wasn’t all that much better. We just lost our way with the set-up, and we never really gathered it back up.

So Saturday was a pretty average day for me in the racecar. When the car doesn’t do what you want it to do, and you can’t chase it to make it better, it’s a pretty hopeless feeling. It makes it difficult.

There is a knock-on effect as well. You can probably trace the right-front tyre failure I had on Sunday back to those set-up issues. I had a lot of understeer, and that’s obviously not good for the front tyres.

Explosive Moment

When that tyre went down, it all happened pretty quickly!

It basically went down as I was pulling sixth gear, so you’re talking about 240 to 250 km/h. I felt the right front go down, the front of the car just dropped very suddenly.

I got off the gas, but I had Andre Heimgartner right behind me, so I had to be very careful. Andre hit me as I got out of the gas, because he just had nowhere to go. So I was already sideways… and then the tyre exploded. All of that happened in a split second.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something that loud and violent in a racecar, to be honest. I was just happy to keep the thing upright and off the walls. We really didn’t want to wreck the car.

With something unexpected like that, you essentially deal with it subconsciously. Your reactions take over and you go into a self and car preservation mode, where you want to keep the thing off the wall and try to reduce the damage as much as possible.

I think I came out of it relatively okay, given what happened and where it happened. But the whole experience just made a very average weekend a little bit worse.

Character-building Experience

Weekends like that happen. You’ve just got to learn from it. It’s character building, but you just have to move on and look forward to the next round.

And the good news is that, as a whole, we’re still in a decent position. Mark Winterbottom and Chaz Mostert both had speed over the weekend, so that’s promising. I’m not sure why we didn’t have any speed, but we’ll debrief this week, go through all of that, and work out where we went wrong.

Then we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

All you can do is learn from these weekends. They have the potential to make you stronger.