Bryce Fullwood Season Wrap Up

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We caught up with Middy's sponsored V8 race car driver Bryce Fullwood for a review of his 2017 season...

In his own words Bryce talks us through his 2017 year:

We had a good year in many ways, but the overall (Super2) Championship position doesn’t reflect the pace we’ve had. We had pretty good speed all year... but we really under estimated the challenge of racing the older generation car at the start of the year. We had to wait until Townsville to get our chance to race the new Nissan. One of the great things about 2017 is that the field was so competitive, to get a top 5 result, you really earnt it! Quite a few main game enduro drivers raced in the Super2 Series for the year so it made for a very competitive series.

The first round of the year in Adelaide was a welcome surprise, the old Ford really liked the curbs and I had a rocket all weekend. Unfortunately, there were some new rules that the team weren’t aware of so I had a few curve balls thrown at me. So while I had to serve penalties due to no fault of my own, the car was really fast and I spent the weekend coming from the back through the field. From memory I passed 33 cars for the weekend which must have been a record for our series!

Tassie was shaping up to be a good weekend as I was about 6th fastest there, still in the old car. However I got caught up in a crash that I couldn’t avoid and it put me out for the rest of the weekend and the chance of a top 10 Championship position for the year.

Phillip Island was really hard in the old car as it lacked the aero of the new cars, and with such a high speed track it was a real challenge to keep inside the top 10 for the weekend.

Townsville finally saw the welcome delivery of the new Middy's Nissan Altima! Even though I had no testing in the car prior to going to the race meet I came home 3rd in Race 2 which was awesome. I was pretty stoked with how it performed, especially on a street circuit. Sydney Motorsport Park was a definite character building weekend for me, the Nissans were expected to do quite well there due to their aero package. When the main teams tested there at the start of 2017, the Nissans were the fastest on track. We were very hopeful of a great weekend however the cars were outside the setup window all weekend and it was just a really hard weekend.

We finally had a test day before Sandown where we made some massive improvements with the car. We were able to tune the car and suspension and really found a good base to work off. The car went a lot faster and I got my best qualifying result of 4th for Race 2 and was able to come home in 2nd. When we rolled out at Bathurst the car was a jet, I was either 1st or 2nd in both practice sessions and we were really making good progress. Both my team mate and I even set new lap records for our class. Due to the Nissan's great aero package, I was actually the fastest across the top and going down the mountain all weekend. Whilst the race didn’t go to plan for a few reasons, it was still a really good weekend for us as we started getting some good pace out of the car.

"I'd like to thank Middy’s for believing in me and choosing to come with me on this journey, it’s been a massive learning curve but I’m not finished yet. My goal for 2018 is to start getting podium results on a more consistent basis and I’ll be working hard to achieve this with the continued support of Middy’s Data & Electrical" - Bryce Fullwood