Australian GT Sprint Round 1

Adelaide Street Circuit

Published on Tuesday, 8th of March 2016

The unforgiving streets of Adelaide are a fantastic start to our racing season providing a challenge for our drivers and a great spectacle for the locals and the dedicated Motorsport fans that make their way to the Clipsal 500.

We are proud and honoured to welcome back Tony Walls, Matt Campbell, Shane Smollen, James Abela, Simon Ellingham as well as Duvashen Padayachee who is joining our Porsche Carrera Cup team for the first time.

We have had a hectic couple of months with the team coordinating the importation (and preparation) of Simon Ellingham's Audi R8 LMS Ultra, conducting our scheduled pre-season maintenance and testing program for all our cars and drivers as well as our Bathurst 12hour campaign with the Objective McLaren a few weeks ago.

Tony Walls #11

Champ

Tony started the weekend well by qualifying 13th outright and 4th in the newly created Gold Drivers Cup for amateur (semi professional) race drivers.

Tony finished a very healthy 7th in race 1 on Friday afternoon despite a minor tyre-pressure issue with his left front tyre.

In Saturday's race 2 Tony wasn’t as comfortable with the handling but was still able to bring it home in 9th outright.

For race 3 Wallsy' new engineer Steve 'Hendo' Henderson made a few tweaks to the car which gave Tony the confidence to hustle Bruce like never before.

After his most inspired drive in AGT the end result was his first win, exactly one year after he joined the category.

Despite Wallsy's very calm demeanour, he was very close to cracking a smile standing on the Clipsal podium accepting his trophy for third outright for the round.

Simon Ellingham #33

Trophy

Simon qualified in the top 20 which the team were very happy with given his lack of experience in a serious GT car.

In all three races Simon did a terrific job working on tuning up the final aspects of his racing game and we are very impressed with the progress he has made.

Excepting a couple of (damage free) exciting moments Si hardly put a foot wrong all weekend, which is not easy with the amount of pressure he has on himself to get up to the front.

After an outstanding first weekend in the AGT Champ class he is the 3rd placed of 6 Audi R8s and 16th outright.

Simon is adapting very well and is on track for top 5 finishes (or better) as the season progresses.

At the next round at the Australian F1 Grand Prix, Simon will be joined by fellow MR driver Tim Miles.

Summary

This was an amazing weekend for MR with race wins and podiums in the premium Porsche Carrera Cup and Australian GT categories.

It was particularly special to see Wallsy take his first race win after his significant investment in the sport and his loyalty to MR.

Many thanks to our drivers, their supporters and the hard working boys and girls from MR who do all the work behind the scenes to keep this show on the road!

It's heads-down and bums-up for the team with the cars and crew getting everything ready and making their way to Melbourne for the Australian Grand Prix in a weeks time. We'll see you there!