Broc Feeney heads into V8 Supercars Tasmania as the championship leader, with practice for the Tasmania Super440 set to begin at 2:05pm AEST after a five-week break from the Supercars Championship. The Triple Eight driver arrives at Symmons Plains with fresh momentum from winning the Jason Richards Trophy for the most points across the two New Zealand events, even though neither he nor teammate Will Brown won during the six-race stretch there.
Feeney said Tasmania is one of his better tracks, and the venue has history on Triple Eight’s side. The team has won over half the races held there since 2007, when the circuit became one of its strongest stops, and it has taken three of the eight races at the track in the Gen3 era. Feeney knows the place can reward a fast car quickly: he scored his first podium at Symmons Plains in his rookie 2022 season, and last year he was denied a clean sweep in Tasmania by 0.05 seconds.
This weekend brings three races, and Triple Eight has leaned heavily on last year’s notes in its preparation as it continues to adapt to the Mustang package. Feeney said the coming rounds feel more familiar than the fast, flowing circuits that opened the year, pointing to Sydney and the Grand Prix as events that were a little different to the tracks Supercars usually visits. At Tasmania, he said, once a team finds its setup it can carry that learning through for much of the year.
That is the attraction for Triple Eight, but also the pressure point. The team has been competitive in some races and not in others, and Feeney said it wants to get back to its consistent way and really understand the package. He did not hide the scale of the task, saying the team is not the fastest car at the moment and needs to make sure it becomes one. His words fit the shape of the weekend: Tasmania is a track where Triple Eight has often been the standard, but also one where the margin has narrowed as the Gen3 era has settled in.
Feeney said he did not want to claim the championship starts now, but added that the category is heading to tracks that are a lot more familiar for the rest of the year. He wants this weekend to be the turning point. “We want to be the fastest car here this weekend, we want to go and win races, and they’ll give us a lot of confidence for the next few rounds coming up,” he said. If Triple Eight can translate its old Symmons Plains strength into a cleaner run in the Mustang, the rest of the season may look a lot more manageable from here.
