Conroy Ends Season On A Good Note
By Lindsay Beer
After struggling with his Mobil 1 #23 car in qualifying and the first race of the weekend on Saturday he found the car a “whole lot better” for Sunday’s two races which included the New Zealand Grand Prix on Sunday afternoon.
echo adrotate_group(26, array("fallback" => 0, "weight" => 0, "site" => "no"));On Sunday morning he moved from his start position of eighteenth through to thirteenth, no mean feat in cars that are notoriously hard to pass in. Later in the afternoon he made similar progress, starting “dead last” in his first ever New Zealand Grand Prix before coming through the field to twelfth at the chequered flag. It could have been even better as he made his way into tenth place, passing Damon Leitch near the end of the race. However Leitch repassed him and Conroy lost a couple of spots dropping him from tenth to twelfth. Had he held the position he would have been the first kiwi home in his first New Zealand Grand Prix.
Summing up his first taste of this level of competition Conroy was frank. “It was always a learning year and it was a massive one. I was a bit of a guinea pig, the first driver to go from Formula Ford to the new FT-50 chassis” (introduced this year). “It is a big step even from the old FT-40 chassis to these cars. What I’ve picked up from the Toyota Racing Series has dragged me up to an even more professional level.”
Conroy was one of only seven drivers who won a race during the sixteen race series and he thanked the M2 Competition Team for their efforts during the series.
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