Murray Battles Through Tough Taupō Debut on Super Softs
By Andrew Clarke
Date posted: 12 April 2025
Cooper Murray endured a character-building Saturday at Taupō, with a difficult opening race and setup struggles on the super soft tyres highlighting the steep learning curve in his first full Supercars campaign.
After a strong qualifying performance on soft tyres saw the #99 entry into the Top 10, things quickly unravelled in the first race when Murray was caught up in an incident with Cameron Hill while battling in the lower half of the top 10.
“Qualifying this morning was good on the soft,” Murray said. “But we missed the window with the car on the super soft. The incident with Hill was unfortunate — we were hanging on to the back of the ten, but that was that.”
Once buried in the pack, Murray said there was little opportunity to recover, particularly on a track where overtaking was at a premium.
“Once you get that one hit and go down the back, it’s near impossible to claw your way back,” he said.
Race 2 provided little relief, with the Erebus driver grappling with a car far outside the setup window on the fragile super soft compound. Murray admitted he had to nurse the tyres just to make them last.
“I had to drive it probably three seconds slower than I should’ve just to keep the tyres alive for more than three laps,” he said. “It wasn’t a hanging-it-out kind of drive — I just had to manage what I had. I think I did the best with what I was given.”
Looking ahead to Sunday’s race — and the return to the soft compound — Murray is optimistic that a return to the setup baseline used in Race 8 qualifying will restore confidence.
“Hopefully we can just get into the shootout and not get taken out. That’d be happy days,” he said.
While the first race was “just shit” in Murray’s own words, he took plenty from the second — even if most of it was about what not to do on the super softs.
“There’s a lot to learn from that second race. Pretty much everything we did was the wrong direction. We’ll be working hard before the next super soft event to get that sorted,” he said.
With the alternating tyre format now a fixture across several upcoming rounds, Murray acknowledged the team would need to go into each weekend with separate plans for the two compounds.
“It’s just a case of the car needing two totally different setups, and you can’t get that sorted in the short space between the two qualifying sessions,” he said. “We’ve got five or six rounds coming up that are the same as this weekend — one session and one race on the super softs, the rest on the softs.”
Image: Erebus
Taupo Super440
Practice 1 – 1: A. Heimgartner 1:26.8830 2: Anton De Pasquale +0.0258 3: Matt Payne +0.0830
Practice 2 – 1: Ryan Wood 1:25.9778; 2: Brodie Kostecki +0.0435; 3: Thomas Randle +0.0838
Race 8 Qualifying – 1 Matt Payne 1:25.7006; 2 Brodie Kostecki +0.0705; 3 Cameron Waters +0.1646
Race 9 Qualifying: 1 Brodie Kostecki 1:26.3482; 2 Chaz Mostert +0.0712; 3 Broc Feeney +0.1939
Race 8 (37 laps) 1 Matt Payne 2 Cameron Waters 3 Ryan Wood
Race 9 (37 laps) 1 Chaz Mostert WAU 37 56.14; 2 Will Davison DJR 37 +6.4763; 3 Brodie Kostecki DJR 37 +9.1911
Sun 8.35-9.05: Supercars Race 10 Qualifying
Sun 10.50-11.35: Supercars Race 10 Top 10 Shootout
Sun 13.05: Supercars Race 10 (61 laps)
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