Van Gisbergen to

Kiwi driver says his Holden Commodore hit a wall during his lap in the Top 10 Shootout. By

SHANE van Gisbergen will start the Bathurst 1000 on the fourth row of the grid at Mt Panorama after being the seventh quickest in yesterday’s Top-10 Shootout.

The Kiwi driver, who has already secured this year’s Supercars Championship, lost pace on his lap by clipping a wall up the mountain, but even so, was able to post a respectable time.

Chaz Mostert will start the Great Race from pole position, with Anton de Pasquale joining him on the front row.

In a race that’s 1000km long and can take seven hours to complete, where you start on the grid it pretty irrelevant, but qualifying and the shootout does give an indication on how well a car is going.

Van Gisbergen has been up there with the pace-setters all week, being the second-quickest in three of the six practice sessions, so his Triple Eight Race Engineering Holden Commodore clearly has enough speed.

When interviewed straight after the shootout, Van Gisbergen said he clipped a wall on his shootout lap.

‘‘I mucked up at The Elbow and hit the inside wall and this thing was rattling,’’ he said.

‘‘I was a bit soft into The Chase, I went too hard. It’s all good, the wrist is a bit sore, but I got it done.’’

Van Gisbergen was the quickest of the first four drivers to take on the mountain, with a time of 2:04.3648, but he didn’t last long at the top of the leader board as Brodie Kostecki, the next driver on, was 0.6 seconds quicker.

Cam Waters then bettered all the previous times, but Chaz Mostert went on to set a new lap record of 2:03.3736, beating Scott McLaughlin’s previous best.

Speaking again later, Van Gisbergen admitted he didn’t have the quickest car for qualifying, but was optimistic about his chances in the race.

‘‘We’ve obviously been lacking in qualifying pace this week, and P7 is where we’ll start the race,’’ he said.

‘‘I’m not too sure how to diagnose the car but qualifying is behind us now and full focus turns to the start of the race and how we’ll tackle the 161 laps around The Mountain.

‘‘It looks like the weather will be a lot cooler, and fingers crossed that helps our race car.

‘‘We had a fantastic car and fantastic pace last year, so we’ve

‘I mucked up at The Elbow and hit the inside wall and this thing was rattling.’ SHANE VAN GISBERGEN

got some focus areas which we can hopefully make better in the race, but it’s going to be a long day.’’

Van Gisbergen’s co-driver, Garth Tander, was also optimistic about the chances of the duo claiming back-to-back Bathurst 1000 titles.

The weather would be very different today, Tander said.

‘‘It’s going to be a lot different; about 10 degrees cooler than the temperatures that we’ve had all of our practice sessions in, so everything we did today was about building options for tomorrow and we’ll decide what we do to the race car to suit the weather tomorrow.

‘‘Although it’s nice to start on pole, it’s not important. We won from fourth last year, and I’ve won from 10th before, so you can quickly forget about the shootout once the race starts.’’

Van Gisbergen was the only Kiwi involved in the shootout as the others didn’t finish Friday’s qualifying inside the top 10.

Andre Heimgartner will start 17th on the grid and Fabian Coulthard will be a further three places behind.

Macauley Jones, who is partnering with Kiwi Chris Pither, was the 22nd quickest.