Right now, Prodrive Racing Australia are the team to beat: Imagine if Chaz Mostert hadn’t backed his PRA Falcon into the tyre bundles halfway through Sunday’s race? The Pepsi Max Crew might’ve had yet one more 1-2 finish, to really send a warning signal to the rest of the field. Still, there’s enough of a body of evidence so far to label Mark Winterbottom and Mostert, to a lesser extent) as serious championship contenders.
As things stand, even the most one-eyed Holden fan must surely be able to admit that those blue Falcons are the class of the field, and if things continue the way they’re going, this might finally be the year for PRA to clinch a championship. The new FGX Falcon looks the goods. It’s been strong everywhere, even if results haven’t always reflected that.
Yes, I know there’s still a long way to run in this championship, but it’s hard to argue with the sort of weekend domination we saw in Winton. I get the feeling that the next two events, Darwin and Townsville, are going to tell us a lot about how the points table is going to look at the end of the season.
If Winterbottom can avoid his seemingly annual championship fade-out that seems to arrive during the dog days of winter, when the series heads up north, and if Mostert can avoid rookie mistakes like Sunday’s effort, then, with Red Bull Racing Australia not quite on the pace, it’s going to be very hard to beat those Prodrive Falcons.
The sprint races need to go, immediately: Did anyone see the crowd – or lack thereof? – at Winton on Saturday? You could just about count them on one hand. Put aside the exorbitant entry prices and arguments that fans won’t go to a live race because they can’t see most of the season on television for a second, and focus on the racing. These sprint races are enough to put me to sleep, and I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who feels the yawns coming on during these sixty-kilometre sprints.
The real reason Winton was basically empty on Saturday was because it’s so damn hard to justify paying so much money to enter the track to basically see the race decided during qualifying. The pattern with these events is that unless you seriously bog down on the start, the pole man or his compatriot on the front row is going to win.
When you take strategy out, the race becomes a 1999-type event, and back then, when the cars weren’t so completely even, the idea had some merit, but now, with passing at a premium – particularly at Winton – you end up watching a procession, pretty much like what we see in Formula One these days. It’s scarcely worth watching at the moment, either on track or at home.
I generally tend to agree with Mark Skaife’s comments last week about how messing with a format mid-season is a controversial thing to do, these are extenuating circumstances, and we’re crying out for change. Something has to be done in time for Darwin, or there’ll be more marshals than fans on Saturdays at these SuperSprint races. Sunday’s two hundred kilometre event showed just what varying fuel and tyre strategies can do. It was great racing!
Cameron Waters is a definite star of the future: The Prodrive Dunlop Series driver completed an ominous clean sweep of the weekend (his second of the young season), and helped the Prodrive squad become the first team in V8SC history to sweep the entire weekend, with their drivers taking top position in every single V8 Supercar qualifying and race, across both the main series and the Dunlop Series – a staggering achievement. For the record, Waters leads his championship by more than a hundred points. Can’t wait to see him driving at Sandown, Bathurst and the Gold Coast.
Sponsorship is important, but event naming rights are getting crazy: The ‘NP300 Navara Winton SuperSprint’ is the biggest motorsports mouthful I can remember since the horribly-named ‘Bridgestone Presents the ChampCar World Series Powered by Ford’ last decade. Talk about a tongue twister! It’s great that Nissan stepped up to become a title sponsor at Winton, but surely organisers could’ve shortened it a little? The NP300 Navara SuperSprint would’ve been fine. When even Neil Crompton is getting tongue-tied, you know you have a problem!
It was great to see Scott Pye up at the business end of the field: Maybe, just maybe, the DJR Team Penske group are starting to figure things out? Rising star Pye managed an eighth place finish in Sunday’s race, the best to date for the Roger Penske-owned squad. You need to look at how things happened for Pye: he started ninth and had made it up to fifth before the first round of stops. That means he was obviously fast, and had a handle on what’s been a tricky car to make sense of so far this year. Hopefully this is the beginning of greater success for DJR Team Penske.
A month between race meetings is far too long: For a sport that’s already finding it more difficult to maintain a large presence on the Australian sporting landscape, a gap of a little more than a month between Winton and Hidden Valley is crazy. If the sport wasn't already lagging behind the two football codes, it sure will be by the time June rolls around, given that the series goes into virtual hibernation until then, whilst AFL and NRL (and even rugby, for that matter) really get into the meat of their schedule.
Task number one for the off-season should be the complete overhaul of the calendar as it stands. Ideally, we should be seeing races every two (or three, at most) between mid-March and mid-November.
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