PremiAir Racing’s Understated Chassis Change Boosts Slade’s Performance

In a move that largely went unnoticed, Tim Slade‘s final Bathurst 1000 campaign as a primary driver will feature a different chassis than the one he began the season with at Mount Panorama. This development was revealed amidst a series of higher-profile mid-season car swaps in the racing world, as reported by V8 Sleuth.

PremiAir Racing, the team behind Slade, switched the driver’s Triple Eight-built Gen3 chassis following a challenging Bathurst 500 event, the first round of the season. The team manager, Stephen Robertson, disclosed that the decision was implemented to potentially enhance Slade’s qualifying performance in comparison to his teammate James Golding.

“It’s no secret that Bathurst wasn’t a particularly good round for us or Tim,” Robertson stated in his conversation with V8 Sleuth, referring to their February visit to Mount Panorama. Robertson emphasized that the intention was to eliminate any doubt regarding the chassis as a variable affecting their performance.

Robertson noted, “We wanted to give him every tool that we could and one of those was that we had the new chassis sitting there. That’s why we didn’t want to make a big thing of it, because we just wanted to give him a new chassis and take that chassis (as a potential variable) out of the equation.”

The team found that the issues with the old chassis were tied to its setup rather than any inherent defects. The new strategy leaves PremiAir with a capable spare car ready for use. Robertson added, “The other car is sitting there, turnkey, ready to go,” underscoring the practical advantage of having a fully functional spare.

“Which you always have a spare chassis but it’s always like ‘we just have got to do this and this’. That one (is ready to go). Which is good because the guys use that for pit stop practice every day so we have already been doing brake pad changes and all that sort of stuff. It’s an expensive mule but it’s worth it,” he explained.

As the only team to conduct such a change, PremiAir Racing, under the leadership of Peter Xiberras, aims to refine their strategy further before the biggest race of the year, scheduled for the coming weekend. During the event, Slade and Golding will be teamed with Cameron McLeod and David Russell, respectively.