Photo: TCR Australia

Néstor Girolami stars at Sandown in TCR Australia practice

Argentinian TCR star and Wall Racing import Néstor Girolami has asserted his dominance as a wildcard entry in the TCR Australia series by dominating the opening day of practice ahead of this weekend’s round at Sandown Raceway.

The three-time winner in the World Touring Car Cup proved that his knowledge of the Honda Civic Type R TCR far outweighed his lack of experience at the iconic Australian circuit, ending up on top of both practice sessions by a healthy margin over championship leader Will Brown’s HMO Customer Racing Hyundai i30 N TCR.

Coming over to Australia for a wild card appearance with Wall Racing to try and get their two full-time drivers in Tony D’Alberto and John Martin back into title contention, Girolami arrived at Sandown with a handful of mechanics and engineers from JAS Motorsport, the builders of Honda’s TCR machines.

Girolami went to the top of the order halfway through the opening practice session with a time of 1:15.6664, well clear of the field and nine-tenths of a second faster than Brown who finished second at the end of the session.

Championship contender Dylan O’Keeffe was forced to sit out a portion of the session after suffering steering damage to his Ashley Seward Motorsport prepared Alfa Romeo Giulietta TCR, eventually ending up sixth fastest.

Practice two saw Girolami further raise the bar, going over one and a half seconds faster than his opening practice time by lapping Sandown in 1:14.1631. Despite being so much faster in the second session, Girolami’s time from practice one was still faster than those of Liam McAdam in the Melbourne Performance Centre Audi RS 3 TCR and team-mate John Martin behind him time in the closing session.

All three Honda machines made it into the top ten across the two sessions as Brown was able to go fourth fastest in the closing practice session, ahead of the other championship protagonists. O’Keeffe missed out on making the top ten in practice two, going just over two-hundredths of a second slower than tenth placed Jason Bright in his Matt Stone Racing Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR.

Qualifying begins tomorrow at 10:15 local time with the weekend’s opening race going green at 13:10. Sunday’s races will start earlier than in previous rounds with race two at 12:15 and the weekend’s final sprint getting underway at 13:20.