MOTORSPORT: Courtney heroics highlight Gold Coast

The Gold Coast 600 turned into a weekend of firsts.

James Courtney managed a win at his first event back from horrendous injury and for his co-driver Jack Perkins it was his first ever V8 Supercars championship race win.

It was also such a poor weekend for Prodrive Racing Australia and Mark Winterbottom that the fight for first place in the driver’s and team’s championships is now well and truly on again.

Or as Winterbottom’s primary pursuer Craig Lowndes termed it: “It’s definitely alive, there’s no doubt about that.”

Speaking of alive, only now is it becoming apparent just how much of a battering Courtney copped when hit by signage stirred up by a low-flying Navy helicopter in Sydney in August.

The Holden Racing Team Commodore VF driver suffered five broken ribs and a punctured lung and missed the opening two rounds of the endurance season at Sandown and Bathurst before making what some thought was a dubiously timed return on the brutal Gold Coast track with its high kerbs and ring of unyielding concrete walls.

Throughout the event, he played down just how much pain he was in, only opening up once he and Perkins had gained their amazing win in Sunday’s 300km race, made possible by a clever fuel saving strategy orchestrated by Courtney’s engineer Al McVean.

 “I am in a lot of pain, it’s hurting a lot,” he said.  “It’s the bumping, the bouncing and everything, it’s pretty violent in there… and that makes it pretty difficult.

“All the cartilage at the front (of the chest), the muscle has been torn off so as you are sitting it’s crunching and that is very unpleasant.”

And he revealed the longer-term health problems he is likely to suffer.

“I am mended enough for me to do this and they say I am going to have pain for the rest of his life with the amount of trauma I have had in there and the way the ribs have been jammed back into my spine and all that sort of stuff.

“All that is still going on and we will be dealing with that for a long time to come.”

Courtney revealed he slept sitting up for the first three weeks after the accident and can still only sleep fitfully on his back now.

He has also had to wean himself off opia-based pain killers before Bathurst in case he was cleared to drive at Mount Panorama.

“I can only sleep on my back and I pass out at about 10.30 and wake up at 12.00 till 3.00am and then I was smashing sleeping tablets to try and sleep and then at 3.00am you sort of pass out again and at 5.30am I’m up.

“I took myself off everything the week of Bathurst because I couldn’t be on it if I wanted to be racing, so I had to get off that.

“And because it was all opia-based things you are addicted to it, and while I was at Bathurst I was going through the cold turkey, cold sweats and all that sort of stuff.

“There has been so much s--- it has been horrendous.”

Winterbottom and Prodrive mightn’t use “horrendous” to describe their weekend on the Gold Coast, but they’d no doubt come up with something similar.

Being released from a pit stop straight into the path of Garth Tander’s HRT Commodore in Saturday’s 300km race broke the front right suspension of Winterbottom’s Pepsi Max Ford Falcon FG X and condemned him to a 23rd place finish. Lowndes and Steve Richards finished third in the opening 300km race, well back from clear winners Shane van Gisbergen and Jonathon Webb in the Tekno Holden.

On Sunday he and Steve Owen could manage only a mediocre 11th place finish while the Red Bull Racing crew took fourth. The result is the points gap has dropped from 399 points to 258. Winterbottom’s soon to be ex-teammate David Reynolds also remains within hailing distance another 60 points back.

There are three championship events left with a maximum 900 points to be won. What was looking like a runaway first title for Frosty after his Sandown 500 win in September may now go all the way to the finale at Homebush in December.

The Pepsi Max Crew’s lead in the teams’ championship also took a substantial knock, not only because of Winterbottom’s issues but also because Cam Waters and Russell Ingall couldn’t unlock the pace of their sister car and finished well down the order.

While less high profile, this championship is a big deal for the teams themselves. The prestige is one thing, but having first pick in the all-important pit lane order for the following season is even more important.

Prodrive (or Ford Performance Racing as it was previously known) has never won the drivers’ or teams’ title in its 13-year existence. While there have been issues this year, most notably Chaz Mostert’s horrendous accident at Bathurst that put him out for the season, the team has operated slickly and professionally and seemed destined to break its duck.

But Saturday was a reminder of the sort of mistakes the team used to make in the bad old days.

“I saw other people having accidents and issues today,” team principal Tim Edwards retorted.

“They can say what they like. Who cares, the reality is we know we did a poor job today and we have got to make sure we don’t do it again.”

Prodrive’s primary pursuer in the team’s championship is HRT, which last weekend moved in front of perennial champions Triple Eight, essentially because the number one car of Jamie Whincup and Paul Dumbrell has been unable to post big points.

It was a double celebration for the red-men on Sunday as Garth Tander and Warren Luff collected the Pirtek Enduro Cup, an award based on the biggest points haul in the three co-driver races. Appropriately, it was the first time HRT had claimed that prize.