Supercars sandwich busy spell of global motorsport for Kiwi driver Jaxon Evans

Jaxon Evans. Photo / Photosport

The Darwin round of Supercars action last weekend was the springboard for a busy three weeks of racing for Kiwi driver Jaxon Evans.

The 27-year-old is off to Mt Fuji in Japan, then Europe for the 24 Hours of Spa in Belgium before heading back to Townsville for the next round of Supercars on July 6-7.

“It’s certainly going to be a really big month for me,” said Evans. “I’ve been doing lots of racing already in all different types of cars, so this is a pretty cool continuation of the busy schedule I’ve already had.

“I’m looking forward to the 24 Hours of Spa, and it’s really cool to be competing there in the 100th running of that race. It’s one any race driver around the world wants to win.”

Evans had his second-best result of the season in Darwin, placing 11th in the second race.

He had earlier success at the Hidden Valley track in the Porsche Carrera Cup Australia series. He scored his maiden race and round win at the track in 2017 and added another victory in his title-winning season a year later.

Evans and his team are focusing on improved performance in Supercars qualifying. After the Perth round last month, he highlighted this as an area to improve and the team worked on it at Queensland Raceway recently.

“To get that rookie test under my belt was a big commitment. We had the whole engineering squad there and a couple of car crews to make sure we got through all the changes we wanted.

“We felt we learnt a little bit, certainly some stuff to take away from. It’s always hard to compare until you’re on track, but all in all, it was positive and we benefited when we had one prior to Taupō.

“There are many areas where we want to improve and do better. Qualifying is definitely our downfall at the moment and that’s what I’ll be aiming to improve. It’s not just the car balance or set-up, it’s a little bit of driver and car synchronisation.

“You qualify up the front, you stay there. It’s as simple as that. You don’t want to make the job any harder by qualifying down the back and that’s been the story this season. Hopefully we can fine-tune our qualifying car and put it all together to be at the back end of the top 10 to race there.”

Broc Feeney won both Darwin races to consolidate his second place in the overall standings. Now on 1245 points, Feeney closed the gap to 108 points on leader Will Brown, who finished second and third last weekend. Chaz Mostert is third on 1074.

Darwin saw all five Kiwi drivers lose ground. Matthew Payne dropped from fifth to ninth overall on 796 after placing 15th and 20th, and the other four all dropped one place in the standings: Richie Stanaway is 10th (763), Andre Heimgartner 12th (750), Ryan Wood 17th (604) and Evans 21st (535).