Matt Stone\u00a0wasn\u2019t surprised that his young driver Zach Bates qualified for provisional pole at Bathurst, saying the team was \u201cquietly comfortable\u201d from their first laps out. <\/p>\n
Bates stunned the gird with the quickest lap in Friday\u2019s qualifying, putting him great stead to have the final lap in Saturday\u2019s top-10 shootout. The garage was lit up with celebration. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a hell of an achievement, young Zach put a lap together,\u201d Stone said to Supercars. <\/p>\n
“We’ve been pacey all weekend, and you’re not sure how you’re going in practice because you don’t know who’s running what tyres and whatnot.<\/p>\n
“But we were quietly confident, and to roll out with two in the 10 and one on the front row provisionally is a pretty cool feeling.”<\/p>\n
Matt Stone Racing have two cars in the shootout as Jack Le Brocq also qualified seventh quickest. <\/p>\n
Stone admitted the team knew that Bates could get the job done. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think we knew before that. We rolled out practice one and we were comfortable, we were happy,\u201d Stone continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had quick cars here last year, and we haven\u2019t been throwing too much at it, we\u2019ve just been fine tuning it and letting the drivers build up their confidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cUp until that last corner on that lap, he was on for a cracking lap. He messed up the easiest corner on the circuit. We got all the hard stuff done, so we were pretty confident going into qualifying.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matt Stone\u00a0wasn\u2019t surprised that his young driver Zach Bates qualified for provisional pole at Bathurst, saying the team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":922509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-922508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/922509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}