Townsville Kicks Whincup
Jamie Whincup is clear about the ramifications of his poor performance at the Sucrogen Townville 400. It could be the medicine he and the Red Bull Racing Australia team needed.
The four times V8 Supercars and Bathurst champion battled poor hard-tyre performance throughout practice, qualifying and the two 200km races, starting just 16th and 15th on the grid in his Triple Eight Race Engineering Holden Commodore VF and translating that into seventh and 12th place finishes.
In the process his Championship lead shrunk to 111 points over teammate Craig Lowndes – who posted fourth and seventh place finishes – while rival factory teams Ford Performance Racing and the Holden Racing Team took the limelight by scoring one-two finishes on Saturday and Sunday respectively.
“It’s almost a kick up the arse,” Whincup told v8supercars.com.au. “We never take anything for granted, but it’s easy to get used to things going right. Even if they don’t we are used to turning it around… We work hard every weekend but it’s a reminder we are not just automatically in the top 10. We have to work for it.
“I have to be careful with my comments because everyone is doing a bloody good job, but we are not quite where we are normally. But I wouldn’t write us off.”
RBRA’s season has not followed the usual script of almost unstinting domination. The team had some struggles early and then rebounded to dominate the Western Australian and Texas events and score two wins out of three starts at the last month’s SKYCITY Triple Crown in Darwin.
However, Whincup had a poor Sunday in Darwin and it was widely expected he would rebound in dominant style at Townsville, where he had won five of the eight races held there.
Instead he was never a factor, something he attributes to the new Car of the Future technical regulations, which he believes are allowing different teams to take the ascendancy as they make progress dialling their new racers in.
“The guys who were really quick this weekend had a test day which moved them forward quite a lot,” Whincup said. “We are really looking forward to our test day next week to try and catch up. Basically, the other guys have done more laps and done a good job, so where we are all at 65 per cent and they have moved to 70 per cent.”
Whincup has made plain all year his dissatisfaction with the way the new RBRA Holden Commodore VF is behaving in comparison to his old Project Blueprint VE.
“Obviously there are new challenges,” he said. “This new car has thrown in massive amounts of new challenge, which is great for everyone really… there is now 12 or 14 cars capable of winning a race.
“We are doing our heads in,” he admitted. “It has not been a nice weekend, we sat there looking at data Friday and Saturday night and not really enjoying it, but when we look back at it at the end of the year we will appreciate the challenge 2013 was.”
