Asian Motor Sports

With local teams filling the top nine places in practice for the fourth round of the V8 Supercar Championship season at Winton Raceway, Team Vodafone driver Jamie Whincup was ‘best of the rest’ at the Victoria circuit as he posted the tenth quickest time.

In a session hit by wet weather conditions, Whincup posted a late lap of 1min 24.9129secs, which left him eight tenths of a second away from the quickest driver, Supercheap Auto Racing’s Paul Dumbrell.

However, Whincup wasn’t happy with how things had gone during the session, and admitted that there was work to do overnight ahead of qualifying.

“We were slightly caught out by the track conditions and failed to come to a good balance setup,” he said. “It looks like it will be a long night studying the data to come up with a good setup for qualifying.”

“If there is a positive to come out of the session we were quite fast in the wet conditions.”

Craig Lowndes in the sister car ended the session with the 20th quickest time after a number of set-up and tyre changes never really giving the desired result – although he only dropped down the order late on when others went out on fresh tyres.

“Our final result was a bit disappointing we were definitely hoping to finish the session further up the order,” he said. “We didn’t have car balance to start with so we worked on that during the first session and the car was definitely at its best straight after the break.

“We decided to make more changes which resulted in a further imbalance that we never solved. I am confident that the engineers will find significant improvements for tomorrow’s qualifying.”

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