Asian Motor Sports

Team Vodafone’s Craig Lowndes has broke team-mate, Jamie Whincup’s winning streak by winning Race 5 of the V8 Supercar Season at Winton Raceway today.

Lowndes was able to utilize the standard Dunlop control tyre early in the race before a well timed Safety Car allowed the Ford driver to pass a number of drivers who had built up a lead on the new, quick wearing, Dunlop super-soft compound tire.

Despite losing his first points race of the season, Jaime Whincup was able to extend his Championship lead with strong second place finish, from Team Vodafone’s second row lock-out in qualifying. It is only the second one-two finish for Triple 8, with the only other one coming in Symmons Plains in 2008.

FPR’s Steven Richards brought his Castrol Ford home in third, completing Ford’s sweep of the podium places.

The race was the first of the season to feature the new Dunlop super-soft tire compound. The tire was a full two seconds faster than the standard tyre, but showed greatly accelerated wear. Teams were allowed to use whatever tyre they wanted, but still had to make a compulsory pit stop.

As a result, the grid for the first race was a mix of standard and soft compound runners, which in turn created a number of incidents and a lot of passing.

Among those involved in the bulk of the action was HRT’s, Garth Tander. The Holden driver, who started from second on the gird with the standards compound tire, lead into the first corner but was punted by Fabian Coulthard in the sixth corner, spinning Tander out of contention. Coulthard was penalized for his efforts.

Tander was involved in two more incidents with Lee Holdsworth and Russell Ingall, but was able to recover his battered Commodore to finish eight.

HRT team-mate, Will Davidson, had a better day, putting in the drive of the day coming from 22nd on the grid to finish seventh.

The Safety Car that helped Lowndes, was brought about by Jason Bargwanna’s Sprint Gas Racing Commodore, which was bogged in the turn three sand trap.

FPR’s Mark Winterbottom, who started on pole, struggled in the race, eventually finishing a disappointing 25th.

Lowndes eventfully took the lead from Michael Caruso, who was struggling on worn super-soft tyres, with eight laps to go and never looked back.

“We wanted two different strategies because we didn’t know which one was going to work and by the look of it both of them came up trumps for us,” Lowndes said.

“The car had great speed but at the same time we didn’t know how hard to push it early on to get the maximum speed out of it, but the drop off was going to be greater.

“For us the Safety Car actually worked in my favour because it brought both of the Valvoline cars and Jamie back to me and we had better tyre life at that point and we were able to get a gap and hold it.”

Whincup said despite the end to his perfect points haul, he was “very, very happy” with his result.

“I pitted on lap one (to take on fuel); I was praying for no Safety Car, but it did come and allowed these guys to catch up,” he said.

“(It is a) fantastic result for everyone at TeamVodafone.”

Richards, who also put the Soft tires on later in the race rather than start on them, came seriously close to unseating Whincup of his second place.

“I was just trying to set myself up where I could have a crack on the exit of a corner and he made it too tough for me,” Richards explained.

“I was surprised actually; we did a run yesterday on the Sprint tyre and it went away quite rapidly towards the end and it didn’t do that today.”