BMW Team SRM took its best on-track result of the weekend during today’s third Australian GT Championship race at Albert Park, but a lengthy Safety Car period hampered Steve Richards’s final classification.

Richards made an impressive start to the 25-minute race, narrowly avoiding first-corner carnage to pop up in 12th position after Lap 1.

However, that very same carnage involved a lengthy clean-up, which means all bar one of the remaining laps was spent behind the Safety Car.

Despite making up one more spot during a frenetic final-lap dash to the finish – putting the BMW M6 GT3 in 11th on the road at the flag – Richards was shuffled back to 18th when the post-race Balance of Performance times were applied, a symptom of the field being too compressed during the caution.

“After a little bit of a problem getting boxed around in the first race,  we’ve made progress in each race. The car is getting better,” explained Richards.

“Every time we use the car we’re making changes to help develop it and make it go faster. To the engine, we’ve got our support team from BMW Motorsport helping us work through some stuff and we’re making progress.
 
“Max Twigg will be in the car tomorrow and he will drive as hard as he can against the other guys and we’ll see where we end up. It should be good.”
 
The result means Twigg will start the weekend’s final race from P18 tomorrow.

“We only had one lap to get information out of the car today, but from that one lap we can see the car was making more horsepower in the cool conditions,” said Twigg. “We just have to have a clean race tomorrow.”