carsales Racing into gear for 2017
carsales.com.au's own Todd Kelly gets a new car, new paint job and new 'backroom' boys for 2017 Virgin Australia Supercars ChampionshipBack in black… and blue! You’re looking at the fresh new livery for the #7 carsales Racing Nissan Altima of Todd Kelly.
Set to debut at today’s Sydney Motorsport Park category tyre test, it’s not only the paintwork that’s new – the Altima has a brand-new chassis built by the squad at Nissan Motorsport.
The new livery and new chassis aren’t the only change either. Kelly, fresh from posting some of the fastest racing laps at the Bathurst 12 Hour in the awesome GT-R NISMO GT3, will campaign in 2017 with a new engineer, Dilan Talabani.
For the 2016 season, the engineering seat in Kelly’s #7 Altima pit was occupied by a number of team members. In fact, in some races, Todd engineered the car from the driver’s seat – the expression 'busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger' comes to mind!
This year ex-Prodrive tech Talabani will be dedicated to Todd’s effort. An additional data engineer will also be drafted into the #7 squad.
"The new carsales Racing Nissan looks unreal, and the team has done a fantastic job to get the car built over the off-season,” said Kelly.
“It’s really exciting to start the year in a new car; especially considering it’s [chassis number] 007, which I’m a big fan of. We had a shakedown last week and the car feels great, so we’ll aim to learn as much as we can today before the season gets underway.”
The 2017 season will be Todd’s 18th.
“We showed good speed towards the end of last year, so we’ve been working hard to carry that across into 2017… To start the season with a full-time race engineer and data engineer means we’re [also] shaping up better than we have in previous years,” Kelly stated.
Today’s pre-season test session will provide Kelly his first opportunity to properly dial in the new carsales Racing Altima before the 2017 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship kicks into action at Adelaide’s Clipsal 500 over March 2-5.
With the added challenge of a new control tyre compound introduced for this season, Kelly believes this will help produce some surprises.
“Everyone is keen to know as much as they can about these new tyres, so the first round in Adelaide will be pretty exciting to watch. We had them available at our shakedown last week but chose not to use them then,” Todd commented.
“Everyone will have been thinking about tyres in the off-season, so we’ll soon see who has figured them out first.”
The carsales Racing Altima is the last of the 2017 Nissan liveries to be unveiled. Yesterday Rick Kelly’s Sengled Altima was unveiled and Michael Caruso’s Nissan-sponsored Altima was shown last week.
The fourth Nissan Motorsport Altima, the Harvey Norman-sponsored car of championship recruit Simona DeSilvestro was also formally unveiled last week.
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