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D’Alberto Looking for an end to his Sunday ‘Curse’
Tony D’Alberto has had ‘half’ of a good weekend at most of the Supercheap Auto TCR Australia Series rounds so far this year.
His Saturday’s have been pretty good; third place in the opening round at Sandown, then a pair of pole positions at Symmons Plains and Phillip Island.
The Wall Racing Honda driver scored a hat-trick of 2024 poles at The Bend yesterday morning, and only narrowly missed out on converting it to a race victory behind eventual winner Jordan Cox.
The pair ran side-by-side down the front straight and into turn 1, but the Peugeot pilot emerged ahead and held off D’Alberto’s advances for the remaining 19 laps.
“I felt like I had a bit more pace than him, but he drove a great race,” D’Alberto said afterwards.
“To get past him I thought there’d need to be a bit of biffo, but I wasn’t prepared to do that.”
To see why, you only have to look at his Sundays so far.
A litany of woes left the 2022 series champion a lowly 10th in the standings ahead of The Bend.
It’s a trend he’s keen to end at Race Tailem Bend.
“(It’s a) great start to the weekend, pole and P2,” he said.
“We want to try and build some points and get that Sunday curse out of our hair.”
Sunday’s TCR action gets underway with the top-10 reverse grid Race 2 at 11:20am local time, followed by Race 3 at 3:50pm.