MOTORSPORT: All change at top in V8 Supercars

Suddenly Ford Falcon FG Xs are dominant in the V8 Supercar Championship, with Mark Winterbottom now heading the points table – and a big change could be on the way at the top of the series organising company.

V8 Supercar chief executive James Warburton is tipped in today’s financial press to become the new boss of FM radio network Southern Cross Austereo.

Meantime, Molly Taylor has made history as the first woman to win a round of the Australian Rally Championship (ARC), while Neal Bates’ 20-year-old son Harry made the podium after the second leg of the National Capital Rally in Canberra.

Australia’s IndyCar champion Will Power will start next weekend’s Indianapolis 500 on the front row, having qualified second to Brisbane-born New Zealander Scott Dixon for the “Greatest spectacle in racing”.

A third spectacular flip in practice at The Brickyard by a car with a Chevrolet engine and aero kit – this one driven by Ed Carpenter, after Helio Castroneves and Josef Newgarden’s crashes last week -- led to all the cars being detuned and having their aerodynamics restricted for qualifying.

Frenchman Tristan Vautier qualified the Honda-powered car that Australian James Davison will drive in the race 21st for a seventh-row start in the field of 33.

Porsche has completed a 24-hour simulation at Motorland Aragon in Spain with one of its 919 Hybrids and its nine top-tier sports car drivers, including Mark Webber, for next month’s twice-round-the-clock Le Mans sports car classic.

The Porsche completed more than 6000km there over four days but the 919’s aerodynamics for Le Mans won’t be revealed until the official test day at the French circuit on May 31.

And Volkswagen has won for the second time in three rounds of this year’s World Rallycross Championship, with its Finnish driver Toomas 'Toopi' Heikkinen victorious in his Polo at Mettet in Belgium.

Norway’s reigning champion and 2003 world rally champion Petter Solberg, who won round two in Germany in his Citroen, was runner-up in Belgium with Latvian teenager Renis Nitiss third in a Ford Fiesta, ahead of Heikkinen’s Swedish teammate at Marklund Motorsport and former WRC competitor Per-Gunnar Andersson.

Solberg retains a 22-point championship lead over another VW driver, Swedish round-one winner Johan Krisoffersson, with another round at Britain’s home of rallycross Lydden Hill, next weekend.

Warburton has been in the “driver’s seat” at V8 Supercars for two years and did the $241 million, six-year TV deal that transferred Australia’s premier motor racing championship from the Seven network to pay service Fox Sports and the Ten network. He previously was the sales supremo at Seven and then briefly headed Ten.

The Australian’s regular Monday media column, The Diary, says Southern Cross Austereo has been through “a challenging and tumultuous period” and that Warburton “is keen for the role [as its new chief executive] and has already been offered the job”.

“At the V8s Warburton has presided over a controversial switch in broadcast partners … imperilling major sponsorship dollars,” Fin Review writer Joe Aston wrote, adding that “a hit of penicillin isn’t going to fix” Southern Cross Austereo.

“It needs 14 pints of blood, 12 rounds of chemotherapy, a liver transplant and a frontal lobotomy,” Aston said.

PRA, formerly Ford Performance Racing, took all three pole positions and race wins at the fourth round of the V8 Supercar Championship at Victoria’s Winton circuit.

Mark Winterbottom has taken the series lead from Holden veteran Craig Lowndes and Chaz Mostert again a star, despite a costly mistake while leading  Sunday’s longest race of the round by dropping a wheel off the track that threw his Falcon backwards into a tyre barrier.

After the pace PRA showed two weeks earlier at Perth’s Barbagallo, with three pole positions and two race wins, Mostert took pole for all the Winton races and won the first of Saturday’s two sprints, before Winterbottom triumphed in the second and then Sunday’s 200km race.

PRA’s third driver, David Reynolds, also had a good weekend, finishing in the top six in all three races.

An older PRA Falcon driven by Cameron Waters, who will partner Mostert in the Endurance Cup in September-October, swept all three developments series poles and wins at Winton.

Winterbottom drove a measured race Sunday, withstanding the pressure of Brad Jones Holden driver Fabian Coulthard with Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Lowndes third in another Holden.

Lowndes now trails Winterbottom by 12 points, while Coulthard has jumped from fifth to third with another month’s break in the season now until the Darwin round on June 20-21.

Jamie Whincup, six times the champion in the past seven seasons, had a modest round by his standards at Winton although he improved each time on his poor grid positions and has risen to fourth in the standings after a 15-point penalty on Holden Racing Team’s James Courtney.

That penalty was for Courtney’s contact with Rick Kelly’s Nissan late in Sunday’s race.

Courtney already was in the bad books for punting Walkinshaw/HRT stablemates Garth Tander and Lee Holdsworth out of Saturday’s second race, for which he copped a drive-through penalty.

Despite HRT’s troublesome weekend, Courtney and Tander are fifth and sixth in the championship, ahead of Shane Van Gisbergen in the Tekno Autosports Holden.

Scott Pye’s eighth place on Sunday was the best result of the championship for DJR Team Penske, where he is deputising for the self-exiled Marcos Ambrose.
It also was a much better weekend for Nissan Motorsport, with two podiums on Saturday – a third for Michael Caruso and a second for Rick Kelly. 

Caruso, who said Nissan now had a handle on its aero changes while still awaiting its major engine upgrade, was fourth on Sunday.

Todd Kelly notched his season’s best finish with fifth in the first race of the weekend, but it was a horror event for James Moffat – who scored the Japanese manufacturer’s only V8 Supercar race win at Winton two years ago, on E70 fuel rather than the usual E85.

Rick Kelly remains 10th in the championship – the only driver in any of the three new makes that have entered the sport in the era of the new-generation V8 Supercars in the top 10.

Will Davison, the Sunday victor in Perth, continued to display his pace in one of Erebus Motorsport’s Mercedes E63s at Winton but a seventh on Saturday was his best finish of the weekend and his cause spoiled on Sunday by a radio failure.

Last year’s rising star Scott McLaughlin’s campaign got somewhere near back on track with two ninth places in his Volvo S60 after his run of woes at the earlier rounds.

And while Ford dominated the V8 Supercars at Winton there was some joy for Holden and its fans in the Touring Car Masters – delivered by a veteran driver synonymous with Fords, John Bowe.

Bowe won all three TCM races of the weekend in his first outing in a Holden Torana SLR 5000.

V8 Supercar Championship driver standings after 12 races – 1. Mark Winterbottom (Prodrive Racing Australia, Ford Falcon FG X) 937 points; 2. Craig Lowndes (Triple Eight Race Engineering, Holden Commodore VF) 925; 3. Fabian Coulthard (Brad Jones Racing, Holden) 851; 4. Jamie Whincup (Triple Eight, Holden) 801; 5. James Courtney (Holden Racing Team) 795; 6. Garth Tander (HRT) 734; 7. Shane Van Gisbergen (Tekno Autosports, Holden) 731; 8. Chaz Mostert (PRA, Ford) 714; 9. David Reynolds (PRA) 708; 10. Rick Kelly (Nissan Motorsport, Nissan Altima) 620.

Driving the Renault Clio in which Scott Pedder won last year’s ARC, the 27-year-old Taylor missed out on victory on Saturday by 2 seconds after a 35-second penalty for checking out of service late following an oil problem.

Tony Sullens scored his first ARC heat win that day in his Citroen.

On Sunday it was the turn of Eli Evans, a non-finisher on Saturday, to take the heat win in another Citroen, by 1 minute 17.8 seconds ahead of Taylor, who said that leg had been “a balancing act” and that she “might have a few grey hairs” after worrying about keeping it all together to the finish.

Sullens wound up second overall for the event with 20-year-old Harry Bates third in his Toyota Corolla Sportivo.

“Didn’t expect that at all, especially in our car compared to who we’re up against. Can’t believe it … a bit surreal,” Bates said.

The event truly marked a changing of the guard in Australian rallying as young Bates and Taylor are the son and daughter of multiple national champion driver and co-driver Neal Bates and Coral Taylor.

That older pair won the classic section of the National Capital Rally in a Toyota RA40 Celica, with Bates senior saying it had been one of the toughest events of his long career. “It feels like we just finished the East African Safari,” he said.

In further evidence of the new talent emerging in rallying, Tasmanian youngster Marcus Walkem won the four-wheel-drive category on Sunday in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX.

Mick Patton was the 4WD winner Saturday and overall in an Evo X, while former national champion Justin Dowel was third for the event in his Hyundai i20 prototype. He was runner-up Saturday and led the final leg until two punctures on the last stage.

Every car in the field has a Dallara chassis and the best of those with Honda power in the line-up for the classic, early next Monday, Australian time, will be those of Brit Justin Wilson and American Marco Andretti in sixth and eighth.

The boost on the 2.2-litre twin-turbocharged V6 engines was cut back to 130 kPa – or about 40 horsepower – from 140 kPa after Ed Carpenter’s flip at turn two during practice and aerodynamic downforce increased.

While Team Penske’s three-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves had turned a lap of the 2.5-mile (4km) superspeedway at an average speed of almost 233.48mph (375.66kmh) during the lead-up, Scott Dixon’s four-lap average in taking pole position was 226.76mph.

Dixon had pole at The Brickyard and won the 500 in 2008. He’s also a three-time IndyCar series champion.

Australian Will Power is in the middle of the front row with one of his three Penske teammates, Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, on his outside.

Brazilians Tony Kanaan and Castroneves are on the second row with Wilson, and another Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais – already booked in for this year’s Bathurst 1000 as Lee Holdsworth’s Holden co-driver – starting seventh.

Carpenter qualified a spare car 12th while Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya, another former winner, was the slowest of the Penske drivers in 15th.

James Davison drove a Nissan GT-R to ninth in the Pirelli World Challenge round at Mosport, Canada, at the weekend before his return to Indianapolis to take over one of the three Honda-powered Dale Coyne Racing cars that Frenchman Tristan Vautier qualified for him to start the 500 on the outside of the seventh row.