TanderSport has adjudged its first weekend as a two-car team a positive one after Leanne Tander took pole position and a rostrum finish in the opening round of the 2008 Kumho Tyres Australian Formula 3 Championship at Eastern Creek Raceway.
Running one car in the Championship Class and one in the Opes Prime National Class, TanderSport aces Tander and Chris Reindler both raced up at the sharp end of their respective fields, immediately justifying the team's substantial programme of expansion carried out over the close-season.
Behind the wheel of her Dallara F307 Mercedes, Tander scored an early point by qualifying on pole position for the first race of the new campaign, setting her best time early on in the session and ultimately sealing the top spot by two tenths of a second following an anxious wait to see how her rivals would respond.
A tardy getaway unfortunately saw to her chances of victory in he race, but the 27-year-old nevertheless hung on to claim a highly-competitive third place, less than a second away from runner-up James Winslow and having run amongst the leading pack race-long. It also marked a significantly better start to Tander's championship challenge compared to the horror weekend she experienced the same time last year.
”It was an up-and-down weekend for us,” she reflected afterwards, “but I think it shows the team will be strong this season. It was great to get the first pole position of the season and show how competitive our car is after just two-and-a-bit days of testing before the round. The track changed a lot overnight [before qualifying] so we had to work out changes to the car to suit how we thought it would be, and it paid off. We're really happy to have come out of the box and put it on pole; it was an ideal start to the year.
