Kody Garland has collected a valuable haul of points on what was a challenging weekend at Phillip Island for round two of the Supercheap Auto TCR Australia Series.
Garland struggled for overall balance through Friday’s two practice sessions, a trait shared across all four of Garry Rogers Motorsport’s Peugeot 308 TCR machines. Despite the imbalance, Garland found improvements overnight and narrowly missed out on the second part of qualifying by just under three tenths of a second.
Race one brought Garland’s best result of the weekend, with a hard fought seventh place finish. The second race, which sees an inverted top 10 grid, promoted Garland to fourth on the grid. The Motor Traders’ Association of New South Wales and Valvoline backed driver fought inside the top five for much of the race, before dropping to ninth in the closing laps with a lack of grip in the Peugeot.
The weekend ended with a challenging final race. A stall off the line dropped Garland to the rear, from where he struggled again with the setup and turned his focus to ensuring a strong finish and avoiding the highly impactful 0 points that would accompany a DNF.
After the opening two rounds of the season, Garland remains inside the top 10 in the championship in eighth place.
“That was definitely a challenging experience, but it’s important that we were able to collect points in all three races,” said Garland.
“The Peugeot’s all struggled on Friday practice and improved a bit over the rest of the weekend, but we weren’t able to get the #41 into the right setup window across the three races to be able to really put up a fight.
“It’s such a tight and competitive championship, you’re going to have less than ideal races, it’s how you navigate those that will determine how well the season goes. In that regard, I’m happy that we were able to finish all three races and get some valuable points to keep us within touch of the championship fight.
“We go to Winton next which is more similar in nature to Symmons Plains where we had a great round, so I’m really looking forward to that,” said Garland.
Round two of Supercheap Auto TCR Australia takes place at Winton Raceway from June 9-11.