“It was very tight,” Kerr reflected of a fraught opening lap in the feature. “We all got really good starts and were pressing each other. I had to have a go at Narain, but unfortunately he ran me out wide and that allowed Adam to have a go at me. It was good, close racing and we enjoyed it. I think everyone in the crowd must have enjoyed it as well.
“I could tell from the pace in the first stint that we [him and Karthikeyan] were both very equal. We had a little bit of an issue with the rear tyres, but we could control the pace after the first stop and even pull away a bit, so we were fairly happy coming into the pits for the second time, but then it just comes down to the pit-stop…
“Unfortunately it didn't quite go our way there, but that's just one of those things. Motor racing is really close, and it was just those crucial couple of tenths that cost us. We had our nose just equal with Narain as we were exiting the pit-lane, but of course the rules state we have to drop in exactly behind them, which meant we had to settle for second place from that point on because Narain and myself were just so close on times.
“I would be close to him, be in the dirty air and then drop back; unfortunately, unlike last year I couldn't run as closely in the dirty air. The gap was a second the whole time – it closed a bit when Narain made a mistake – but then unfortunately we were in the dirty air and of course we dropped back a little bit again.”
With Kerr failing in his quest to make it two wins out of two by just over a second in the final reckoning, Jonny Reid's second successive eighth place aboard
Black Beauty was narrowly enough to safeguard the Kiwis' runner-up spot in the rankings, a sole point clear of Great Britain in a carbon copy repeat of 2006/07, when the latter was similarly agonisingly defeated in the Brands feature race – then by champions Germany.
