Nissan to show ”car’s true potential” in Melbourne

Nissan had a mixed V8 Supercars premiere weekend in Adelaide but driver Todd Kelly is confident for a step up in the results for the coming race in Melbourne.
“It’s not a huge turn around to get to the next round, and hopefully we can show what the car’s true potential is at the Grand Prix,” said Todd Kelly.

Brother Rick Kelly was the best scoring Nissan driver this weekend with fifth position in the 250 kilometer race and fourth position in the drivers’ championship, despite serving two drive-through penalties.
“I still don’t know what we did wrong; for me a safety car is put out for safety reasons, so at the end of it you just want to resume racing in a fair manner. It’s absolutely been a lottery with every restart we have done under this new format. I’m disappointed by that. Then I had another drive through penalty for speeding in pit lane, but I obviously have to put my hand up for that one, if that has happened then it is absolutely completely my fault,” said Rick Kelly.

Norton Racing drivers James Moffat and Michael Caruso had a tough weekend with just two top ten finishes in the three races. Both drivers looked set for a competitive result in the third race, but suffered from incidents and penalties.

Caruso got hit by a charging Jamie Whincup and dropped back to 14th position after being as high as sixth in the race.
”We are pretty disappointed. We had a top five in the bag, there was only 15 laps to go and we were looking pretty comfortable. Jamie went for a pass from pretty far back and slid into me. It broke some arms in the rear of the car and I was out of contention. Without that incident, we might have been inside the top seven of the championship which would have been nice, but we’ll go away and work on it at the Grand Prix,” said Caruso.

Moffatt was involved in a high-speed incident with Will Davison and served a drive through penalty for it.
“In regards to the incident with Will, it was probably one of those things where the penalty was judged on the result of the incident. I’m not sure my penalty was entirely fair. I had to turn in at some point otherwise I was going to run into the fence. If it had been the same collision at Turn 4 or Turn 5, it probably wouldn’t have been an incident. It was unfortunate, and you never want that sort of accident to happen,” said Moffat.

The Clipsal 500 weekend left Nissan teams Norton Hornets Racing in fourth position in the teams’ championship and Jack Daniel’s Racing in fifth position.
“It’s probably the most eventful race I can remember having, so I’m really excited about that, we’ve got good points to take away, and we flexed a bit of muscle from Jack Daniel’s Racing’s point of view to say that we are back,” said Rick Kelly.