MOSTERT PRIMED FOR A FLAT-OUT FINISH to 2021
Chaz Mostert could be the busiest man in Australian motorsport if the final months of the 2021 season run to schedule.
A combination of Supercars, TCR and GT racing could see him running at the front for seven meetings between October and December, provided there are no further Covid-19 changes to the calendar.
Mostert is currently recharging his batteries at home on the Gold Coast and not worrying too much about the future.
“I’ve been treating it as an end-of-year break. I haven’t been thinking about racing at all. Taking it easy, spending time with the family,” Mostert tells Race.news.
With huge lock-down and border restrictions causing uncertainty around the scheduling of major motorsport, Mostert says he is unlikely to complete his original plan. He was focussed on the Repco Supercars Championship with Walkinshaw Andretti United, but with a Audi RS3 ride in the SuperCheap TCR Australia Series that has taken him to the lead of the tin-top tiddler championship as well as a co-driver slot on the GT World Challenge Australia in an Audi R8 LMS.
“I’ll just wait and see what happens. I probably won’t be doing all the meetings. The dates are pretty conflicting,” he says.
“At this stage I’ll definitely lose one round of TCR. And maybe the second. If you look at the dates, they don’t match.”
The current calendar has Supercars meetings at Winton on October 2-3, Phillip Island on October 23-24, Bathurst on November 4-7, Sydney on November 19-21 and Gold Coast on December 3-5, with the TCR Australia Series at The Bend on October 15-17 and Bathurst on November 26-28.
Mostert would be forced to juggle his commitments around travelling, sponsor and media work, as well as the actual race meetings, to get close to completing his original plan for the year.
“I’ll be doing all the supercar rounds and if I can do the TCR races I’ll be there too. I’ll always be doing Supercars over ARG (Australian Racing Group). I have a hard contract with WAU and ARG is pretty much freelancing for myself. So it’s a no-brainer.
“Obviously Supercars is running well for me. I want to finish off strongly with that. And I’m sitting in a good position with TCR. So the conflicting dates are not ideal. But, at the end of the day, it’s something that’s out of my control.”
Still, Mostert and his long-time mate and engineering guru, Adam De Borre, do have control of their Supercars future and he is hopeful that advances over the meetings at Darwin and Townsville will translate into genuine front-running pace to the end of the season.
“We are still looking for a little bit. But where the championship is, you have to take chances. We’ll take the opportunities to try and close that little bit of a gap. It’s something have to do,” says Mostert.
“We came out of Darwin with some good results and went to Townsville 1 and took a chance to go forward. But it didn’t work and we couldn’t back out of things. So we went back to simplicity for the second Townsville weekend it was a big turnaround.
“When we went to Townsville 1 we thought it would play to the car’s strengths, but it didn’t work out. So we’ve probably got to learn not to count the chickens so much. It kinda gave me a bit of a reality check.”
The Supercars title is out of reach despite wins in Tasmania and Darwin, but with Bathurst just over the horizon, Mostert is happy with the pace of his WAU Commodore without under-estimating the threat from Shane van Gisbergen and Jamie Whincup from The Bulls.
“The same guys are going to be strong. There were two cars that were super-quick at Bathurst last year, and again at the start of this year, and they will be the ones to beat.
“But we were third in the sprint round. So, in the worst-case scenario, I expect to be around there. And in the best case we’ll move forward.”
