Erebus Academy Super3 driver Jobe Stewart has claimed second overall in Townsville after replicating yesterday’s P2 finish, while Super2 teammate Jay Hanson finished P7 after a strong race. 

Starting from P10, Jay lost two positions on the opening lap. However, an incident between Cooper Murray and Aaron Love saw Jay take advantage of the slowing pace and move up three positions to P9 just one lap later. 

Meanwhile, having qualified P2, Jobe made a solid start though a gap of over 10 cars to Super3 race leader Cameron McLeod, meant it would be extremely difficult to move forward to P1. 

However, with a dropping McLeod and a fast Jobe, by lap 3 the gap had closed to seven cars between them after Jobe had managed to pass three Super2 cars by lap 8. 

On the same lap, Jay was hot on Nash Morris’ tail and had closed the gap to 0.3 of a second. Varying margins  between the two continued for the next nine laps, with Jay’s pursuit of Morris concluding on lap 17. 

With 5 minutes to go, the yellow flag was waved on lap 22 after Chris Smerdon was stopped on track with Jay running P7 and Jobe holding onto P2 where they remained under Safety Car until the checkered flag was waved.

After the race, Jay said: “We definitely knew we had our work cut out for us today after qualifying a bit further back than we hoped. I was able to finish 7th for the weekend which wasn’t too bad but definitely not where we wanted to be after finishing first in practice on Friday. We wanted to finish higher in qualifying but there were a couple of  little mistakes that we definitely need to tidy up on. We finished in the top 10 which is still a good result but now it’s getting to the point in the Championship where we really need to finish in the top 5 every single race to capitalise and be where we want to be.”

Jobe added: “We started the weekend off strong with two top threes in practice and even though we weren’t too worried about our practice position, we were still pretty happy with it. We finished second in qualifying on both days but we were a bit off the pace compared to the leader so we started further back amongst the Super2’s which meant we were too far to catch up. Overall, we’re still holding onto the Championship lead so we’re really happy with that heading into Sandown.”

Jobe continues to hold the Super3 Championship lead, while Jay sits just outside the top five in sixth on the Super2 leaderboard. 

The Image Racing duo will be rejoined by Jack Perkins for the fourth round of the Dunlop Series at Sandown, September 15 – 17.