Davison Coming Back For Bathurst
Will Davison lost his Supercars seat for 2020 to COVID-19 but now the coronavirus could be giving him a second chance.
The two-time Bathurst winner was left on the sidelines when his backer Phil Munday shut down his 23 Red team at the height of the pandemic in Australia, but travel bans from the USA mean Alex Premat is out of Bathurst and Davison is expected to return to the grid.
There is no confirmation yet from Tickford Racing, which is locked-down in Melbourne with its race crews on the road in Sydney in the early days of what could be a five-week Supercars road trip.
“I’ve got more important things to worry about just now,” Tickford boss, Tim Edwards, tells Race News.
He point-blank refuses to talk about the only surviving endurance race on the revised calendar for 2020, and says a final plan for the Bathurst 1000 is many weeks in the future.
But pitlane talk says Davison has definitely done some sort of deal with Tickford and is only waiting for the final details.
There have been many rumours and potential plans since Davison was sidelined, with talk of Wildcard entries by two different teams.
The most-radical rumour was a ‘Blues Brothers’ suggestion that would have paired him with Steven Johnson in a Wildcard entry with a Ford Mustang.
But Tickford was always the most-likely scenario, with four co-driving places across the team’s Mustangs.
It became more than just a good idea when Premat, who lives in Las Vegas and would have been doing a fly-in, fly-out run for Bathurst, was effectively ruled-out by travel restrictions on any non-essential people wanting to travel to Australia.
The most-likely Bathurst combination will see Davison jumping into the Monster Mustang alongside Cameron Waters, in a direct replacement for Premat, but the team’s other co-drivers could be shuffled to pair him with either Lee Holdsworth or Jack Le Brocq.
The only definite non-starter would be Davison with James Courtney.
Edwards admits his co-drivers are not contracted to a specific pairing but is not giving any hints, or confirmation.
Instead, he says he is flat-out on strategic plans for Sydney Motorsport Park on the weekend.
“Sydney is going to be on steroids, compared to what we saw last time. No-one will have enough good tyres for all three races,” Edwards tells Race News.
“No-one can go there thinking they can win all three races. So you can go for glory at some point, or look to average it out over three races and be the accumulator for championship points.”
He expects plenty of action as teams and drivers manage their mix of hard and soft-compound Dunlop slicks, with a five-second difference in lap times between a fresh soft and a well-worn hard.
“Everyone will go there with a plan but you will have to adjust on the run. We saw that last time with Lee Holdsworth, when he got a bad start and we switched the plan and he came through the field.
“If you make a bad start you could dump one plan and make a switch. I think we’re going to see some great spectacle.”
