Photo: V8 Supercars Media

Race of technical dramas for James Courtney, but key points still bagged

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James Courtney and Greg Murphy finished 13th in today’s Bathurst 1000 in the sole Holden Racing Team entry of the race, and picked up key championship points to keep the title battle alive, with 451 points now the gap to leader Jamie Whincup, despite a raft of technical issues with their Holden Commodore.

From the start of the race, Courtney’s car suffered a dashboard readout failure, which was unable to be remedied by a steering wheel change which took place at the first pit stop when Greg Murphy took the wheel of the car, with both drivers forced to race without instrumentation for the first phase of the race.

“This is the most extraordinary Bathurst we’ve had in a long long time,” said Courtney to TouringCarTimes. “There were so many guys that were in with a shot at different points during the race, and the car that won was stuck in the fence, so it shows you should never stop pushing. We were four laps down at one point and gone down to just within one lap of the lead.”

The team’s dashboard readout turned out to be the least of their problems, after the problem became compounded when they tried to take advantage of the red flag stoppage on lap 61 to repair it.

“In the early part of the race we had no dash and we were running top three, the car was really quick and Greg (Murphy) was really speedy as well, but when they changed the wiring loom (under the red flag) some throttle sensor failed after the restart, that’s when we lost all that time, so they pulled the airbox off to fix it, but then they didn’t put the airbox on properly so it wasn’t sealed properly, so we didn’t have any power, so it all just spiralled out of control, he added.

“It didn’t hurt us that bad in the championship, we’re equal fourth so it’s not dire, but it’s just so disappointing. We had a car that was capable of so much more but we just had so many dramas through the day.

“Our fight was just to try and get on the lead lap and try and get as many championship points as we could, once the weekend goal (of victory at Bathurst) is unachievable, you start to look at the bigger picture.”