The penultimate round for the Repco Supercars Championship on the Gold Coast brings happy memories for SCT Motorsport’s Jaxon Evans.
Evans’ current home base, the Gold Coast, was the scene of his Porsche Carrera Cup Australia title win in 2018, which set him up for a successful stint overseas before returning to contest Supercars full-time this year.
“The last time I raced at the Gold Coast was when I took the Carrera Cup title in 2018,” Evans said.
“It’s my home base now, it’s where I went to school and things like that, but I know it’s a difficult circuit. I’ve always enjoyed watching the Supercars fly over the big chicane, but I know now after at least driving the car for this year it’s not going to be an easy task.
“However, I’ve got some good memories and I’ll go there with positive thoughts where I hope to have a strong weekend as I continue to build on what we started at Bathurst.”
Although he hasn’t competed on the famed Gold Coast street circuit formerly the home to IndyCar, Evans has kept an eye from a far on the Gold Coast event and is excited to compete in his adopted hometown.
Evans heads to the circuit along the beach with a solid build up after a top 15 qualifying performance at the Repco Bathurst 1000 after barely missing a Top 10 Shootout berth by 0.146s.
“I’m starting to feel like the tyre phasing or the understanding of it for me is quite good or trending in the right direction especially if we look at Bathurst. We ran five sets of tyres in qualifying where we made a step forward with each new set. I felt more and more comfortable with what I was doing with the tyre in its prep, then how to extract the lap time out of it,” he said.
“Gold Coast is a very important track to qualify well at, so we’ll get through practice before we start to think too much about how to maximise the ultimate speed, but I feel like we can continue to build.”
Qualifying will be more important than ever within the tight confines of the Gold Coast circuit and this is where Evans has improved throughout the season as he enters the penultimate round on a high following Bathurst.
Gold Coast will provide Evans with a hint at what’s to come in a pair of 250 km races split between Saturday and Sunday also providing the format in Adelaide.
“It’s awesome to finish the season at Gold Coast and Adelaide, which are two challenging street circuits,” Evans said.
“There is a lot of risk management involved I guess. I feel like now I don’t want to put a target on where I’m finishing or where I want to be, but more just using the experience that I’ve gathered this year to stay consistent or continue to build on the results
“There’s only been one top 10 this year, which is quite frankly not good enough, so we want a couple more of those.
“We’ll be going to the Gold Coast and Adelaide trying to achieve more, but understand these places aren’t easy to make these cars go faster racing 250 km each day.”
The Boost Mobile Gold Coast 500 will be held on October 25-27.
