Tony Bates and Eggleston Motorsport scored the first victory of the 2017 CAMS Australian GT Championship with their Mercedes AMG GT3. Bates was able to dominate the second half of the race, taking the win by seven seconds.
Bates took advantage of his driver ranking and mid-field qualifying performance to take the lead after the compulsory pit stop round. His 50 second compulsory pitstop time was some 30+ seconds faster than some of his direct competitors.
Before the pitstop window, Bates was running as high as sixth but after all the competitors make their stops, he emerged in the lead that he was able to maintain during the final 12 laps.
Roger Lago took second place in his Lamborghini R-EX ahead of Pete Major in a similar Lamborghini. Major, in his first Australian GT race, was just a couple of seconds behind Lago and was trying to close the gap after the pit stop cycle but ran out of time. Throughout the final five laps, Major was around one second per lap faster than Lago but there was not a chance to mount an attack for second.
Meanwhile Blancpain GT Champion Liam Talbot took fourth place in his Walkinshaw Porsche, finishing eight seconds behind Major.
The crew that led the start of the race – the Supabarn Supermarkets Audi of Ash Walsh and James Koundouris – finished sixth behind Tony Walls’s Objective Racing McLaren.
The Walsh/Koundouris combination had a pitstop time of 82 seconds finished 35 seconds off the lead. They fought back from 10th after the pitstops but were unable to make up the time lost in their longer pitstop time.
The other early leaders, the Jamec PEM Audi of Kelvin van der Linde and Geoff Emery were setting a spectacular pace – including a new lap record of 1:20.210 on lap 4 – but were brought undone by a drive through penalty. Van der Linde was punished for weaving behind the safety car and in the end, the duo finished 13th.
There were two notable incidents in the race, the first being Tony Quinn, who put his Darrell Lea McLaren into the wall on the opening lap after getting it wrong through the Senna Chicane and hitting Max Twigg’s Mercedes on the exit.
A few laps later the same mistake caught out second-placed Nathan Antunes, who lost control of his GT Motorsports Audi R8 and also collided with the wall on the exit of the infamous left-right. Both DNF’d.
The second race gets underway at Saturday 9:10am local time.
Photo courtesy of Australian GT
