Liam Lawson returned to the podium in the final race of the penultimate round of the Australian Formula 4 championship in Sydney over the weekend.
The Pukekohe teenage missed out on two more podium chances after incidents deemed not to have been of his making.
In the first race, Lawson’s teammate Simon Fallon clashed with him while dicing for third place which forced them both off the track and in race two, Lawson was hit off the circuit from behind after making a great race start and looking likely to grab second place.
Lawson twice had to charge back through the field and recovered to sixth place in both races.
“I just had so much bad luck this weekend it was nice to end up back on the podium for the last race,” said Lawson, who struggled to find the pace in his car that he’d shown earlier in pre-event testing.
“It’s a bit of a mystery but there was no pace in my car,” he said. “We dropped nearly a second a lap from our testing pace and while we got some of that back I just didn’t have the car to take the fight to the front runners .
“We changed all the shocks for Sunday’s racing and the car was better, but I still could’nt take the fight to Cameron [Sheilds], he was just too quick all weekend.”
While Lawson was harshly penalised in his championship aspirations his BRM teammate Shields’ season took a turn for the better after switching to a different chassis for the Sydney round.
Sheilds recorded his first pole of the season, won the opening race and was runner-up in the other two races and snatched second place in the championship away from Lawson.
The CAMS Jayco Australian Formula 4 Championship leader Nick Rowe extended his series lead after Sydney and goes into the finale on the streets of the Gold Coast in October with a 52-point advantage over Sheilds on 268 and Lawson with 238.
Proudly supporting Lawson’s Formula 4 campaign is RetroCar.co.nz, along with the Giltrap Group, NZ Childcare Finance, BG World Wheels, Archibalds , Maugers, TACCOC, Cyrus International Cargo, Men at Work, The Porter Group and Showerdome.