Erebus Motorsport has endured a tough 300-kilometres today, after a promising start to Saturday at the Gold Coast 600.

David Reynolds qualified in 5^th position after rolling out his quickest time of 1:10.9955 during the morning’s opening session. Shae Davies struggled with the tracks evolution, leaving him 26^th for the start of the race.

Forced to contend with a variety of traffic, Craig Baird’s race was short-lived when he became the victim of an incident on lap 2. Jonathon Webb created the chaos, instigating contact with Dean Fiore, sending him into Baird.

With traffic backed up at turn 4, Baird eventually got going and limped his way into pit lane. He made a return for one lap before heading back into the garage where the team found substantial damage to the steering, ultimately ending their race.

Navigating his way through the concrete jungle, Chris van der Drift propelled his way up to 19^th before the first Safety Car was called.

Pitting for fuel and tyres, the kiwi stayed in and pushed up two more positions before swapping out with Davies on lap 35.

The #4 Commodore showed consistent pace, getting as high as 16^th before the team lost radio communication. Davies ran solo for the remaining laps before passing the checkered flag in 19^th.

The final race of the Pirtek Enduro Cup runs tomorrow, with qualifying first at 9:35am local time.

Shae Davies – #4 Holden Commodore

“Today was tough, I was a bit disappointed with both my performance and the cars performance in qualifying. We made a call that didn’t end up being the right call for qualifying and the track conditions.

“Chris did a great job and got off to a good start and we managed to stay out of trouble and just keep chipping away. We struggled with our driver change but going again, however unfortunately early in that next stint I lost radio communications so it was about 60 lap all on my own. I had to do a bit of guessing of when they wanted me to stop and unfortunately it put us undone at the end. I came into the box under the last safety car when I shouldn’t have, so it’s a bit of a bummer as we could have been a couple spots up.”

Chris van der Drift – #4 Holden Commodore

“It was a pretty crazy race, the start was probably my best so far and I just found my way through. There was an incident, where unfortunately Craig got spun around; I thought they’d get pushed outside and I went to go to the inside but there was a traffic jam and it took a while to get around.

“I managed to start catching up to the other cars and made a few passes at the end of my stint, I really enjoyed it and I think we were looking pretty good. We have no serious damaged and I’m looking forward to tomorrow, especially to see if Shae can get up a few more spots in qualifying and just have a decent race.”

David Reynolds – #9 Holden Commodore

“Today started off very good and we qualified P5, with qualifying the main focus for this round. We went into the race and Bairdo got a good start and was jostling for position when something went wrong. A car tried to overtake the car behind him, stuffed it up and drilled us. We got turned around and that was our day done on lap 2.

“It sucks but there is nothing we can do about it, today just wasn’t our day and we will come back better tomorrow.  Qualifying shows we can do it and there’s no reason why we can’t do it again, and even improve on today. If I do a really good job I think I can put it in the top three tomorrow”

Craig Baird – #9 Holden Commodore

“As I said yesterday, we had a really good car and I was confident Dave was going to qualify well. The aim for me during the race was to stay out of trouble and just bring it back for Dave because he had a car that was well inside the top five the whole weekend.

“I did that; one of the few lead drivers that started was Winterbottom, so I let him go as he was obviously going to have more speed than me and then just wanted to mow down 36 odd laps. Someone further back in the chain at turn 4 and had a bit of a dive, hit the back of the Nissan, the Nissan hit me and turned me around. I almost had it and then got another tap and got spun around. By that stage we had pushed the bodywork against the tyres and bent the steering; I think one of the HRT cars clipped it as well and bent the rear wing.

“It was disappointing to then be out of the race because I was really comfortable in the car and had been all weekend. We had good speed and a good race car, so as far as the team goes we pulled together and it could have been a mega result. The whole package is just working here and it’s a shame Dave couldn’t drag it up onto the podium but that’s motor racing.”