Round 3 of the Austeam Racing Wednesday night fixed Setup League was at Las Vegas for 200 laps.

All the teams that fronted focused on long runs to get used to the setup and it showed with only 2 cautions.

The race started with Barry Neale on the pole for the 2nd week in a row and he led for the first 63 laps with Paul Drady keeping Neale in sight for most of the run until he went into fuel saving mode.

Early trouble for Josh Melton and Shaun Doecke ending their chances for top 3 finishes.

The First of the green flag stops occurred and unfortunately for Neale he had a slight mishap with Brett Fisher and ran into the back of him and had serious damage which put him 9 laps down.

After the first round of Stops it was Paul Drady leading with Mark Smith in 2nd and Brett Fisher in 3rd.

Phil Bissett was having another very clean run until a driving error ended his day.

On lap 92 Paul Drady had a moment out of turn 4 putting the car onto the grass and then sliding back up onto the race track and into the wall. This put the car behind the wall for 20 minutes of repairs ending a good run for the 29 Lucas Oils Camaro with 47 laps led.

The yellow came out when Todd Emery and Mark Smith got together putting Brett fisher in the lead with a lot of work for Mark to do to try and catch and then pass Brett.

As the laps counted down the interval between Fisher and Smith was less and less until Mark finally made the pass for the lead with about 30 laps to go and wasn’t headed.

The Top three were

Mark Smith 1st

Brett Fisher 2nd

Todd Emery 3rd

The race had 2 cautions for 8 alps

6 lead changes

Race Time was 1 hour and 55 minutes

We took a Quote from Shaun Doecke at the end of the race.  “That was a tough night for the #77 PPG mustang team. Was shocked by grabbing P3 in qual and was just going to take it easy and keep it straight. Seems I took it a bit too easy and on lap 2 or 3 had a big tank slapper moment in T1, resulting in a hard hit with the outside wall. Managed to keep it going without bringing out a caution to find 9mins of repairs waiting for me. Thankfully the car was drivable and so headed out to grab points and hopefully stay out of the way. Managed to climb some spots when others had their own dramas to claim P5.”

 

Next Race it at Phoenix for 140 laps

By Admin