Kelly confident for Bathurst 1000

Todd Kelly heads to the Bathurst 1000 confident the carsales.com.au Nissan Altima will put in a more competitive showing than in the Sandown 500 warm-up.

Kelly and English co-driver Alex Buncombe lost any chance of a decent result in the opening event of the V8 Supercars endurance season because of a fuel pump failure. Buncombe then compounded the problem when he ran off and got bogged in the Dandenong Road sand trap.

The end result? 24th place.

"It was good he got that out of the way when we were five laps down or whatever it was," Kelly said of Buncombe's self-admitted error.

"Sometimes things like that need to happen ... I would imagine he will be pretty cautious at Bathurst. It's a long, long day and even the best of us need to approach that race with caution.

"You really need to be on it every kay of the 1000km to make sure you don't get caught out."

While this will be only the second time Kelly and Buncombe have teamed up at Mount Panorama in the Great Race – they finished seventh last year – this will be Kelly's 18th start as well as the 10th anniversary of his 2005 win with Mark Skaife in a Holden Racing Team Commodore.

And just to tie him even more to the 1000, he will celebrate his 36th birthday on Friday – qualifying day at the mountain.

Kelly says the level of competition has risen so much that recovering from a mistake and getting back to the front of the Bathurst field is now a huge challenge.

"Back in 2005 and those days you could (fight back more easily)," he told motoring.com.au this week as he made the traditional road-trip to Bathurst with brother Rick in a Nissan Figaro.  

"You had quite a lot more staggered pace through the cars and also through the drivers and if you did find yourself up the back you could knock off 10 cars quite easily during the stint.

"Now you can have a bloke running around in 22nd and be stuck behind him for the whole stint and not able to get past.

"So you need to really edge your way up there and be there or thereabouts for the last few stints. And you need to be in the top five or seven for sure in the last stint to have a sniff of the podium. It's not like the old days where you could pass 10 cars and drive your way there."

That's especially the case for the Nissans, which have struggled for straight-line speed for both aerodynamic and power reasons since they debuted in the championship in 2013.

Since then there have been two revisions to the Altima's aerodynamic package, while a long awaited cylinder head redesign finally made it into two of the four Nissan Motorsport entries at the Sandown 500.

Kelly and Buncombe missed out then but are understood to have been upgraded for Bathurst, leaving only last year’s runners-up James Moffat and Taz Douglas with the old donk. However, the team’s ‘no comment’ policy on the engine program meant Kelly wasn’t saying either way.

But he is confident the Altima will be more competitive against the Ford Falcon FG Xs, Holden Commodore VFs, Volvo S60s and the Erebus Benzes at Bathurst simply because the recently resurfaced and grippy track suits the Nissan better than Sandown with its old and bumpy surface.

"Bathurst is the opposite extreme [to Sandown] and we are a fair bit more confident at that style of circuit," said Kelly. "So you can't really take much out of Sandown for Bathurst other than the refuelling, driver changes and pit stops went like clockwork."

The potential competitiveness of the Altima at Bathurst was underlined in 2014 when Moffat qualified in the top 10 and finished second with Douglas in one of the craziest, topsy turvy and incident packed 1000s ever. Douglas crashed twice during a race that had an hour long break to repair the crumbling track.

It's certainly a good indication of what can happen if you are there at the end of the race," said Kelly. "And it doesn't matter if you have a really good car or a car that is not quite there, you never know what can happen if you work all day to put yourself in that position.

"So you spend the whole day just worrying about the last 20 laps and where you are trying to be. That car wasn't the second fastest car on the day that's for sure, but it finished second. So we have to make sure we put ourselves in the position to capitalise on something like that happening again."

A string of bad recent results has hammered what was shaping as Kelly's best season in years, so grabbing a big haul of points at Bathurst will be a great help in putting him back in contention for a top 10 championship position.

"It's about time I won the damn thing again," he laughed.

"I think you just have to be at the right place at the time, more or less. Because if we get everything else spot-on with the car and the set-ups and everything, if you are there or thereabouts at the end – obviously you need some pretty good speed, and strategy is a big part of it – it's always going to come down to the last 10 laps because the cars are so close.

"You don't win these days by chance, you have to be the best on the day to win it at Bathurst now. So we need to be the best on the day."