MOTORSPORT: Mostert rises in Sydney V8s

While Chaz Mostert was the star at Sydney Motorsport Park’s V8 Supercar SuperSprint over the weekend in his Pepsi-Max Ford Falcon FG X, it was the bizarre circumstances in which Holden Racing Team star James Courtney was sidelined that dominated the headlines.

Courtney was standing in pitlane on Friday minding his own business when a Navy helicopter participating in a display flew low overhead. Its wash dislodged a large panel that then smashed into his body, breaking two ribs, collapsing a lung and forcing him to Westmead Hospital.

Given such injuries take around six weeks to heal it seems impossible he will make it back for the upcoming Wilson Security Sandown 500 and perhaps even the blue ribbon event of the season, the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000.

As Courtney was fifth in the championship going into the Eastern Creek event 371 points off the pace, the 35-year-old’s championship chances were already shaky. Now, they are done and dusted.

As one of the most talented drivers on the grid and a 2015 race winner his absence from the grid is a huge loss, although Garth Tander may have mixed feelings after being bundled off the road twice this year by his teammate.

Courtney, the 2010 V8 Supercars champion, also does much good work out of the cockpit with his straight shooting comments about rival drivers and teams.

His prediction back in June that PRA (or Ford Performance Racing as it was known until this year) would “step on its dick” was his best effort of the year so far, because it encapsulated what a lot of people thought; that the Ford team’s history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory will come back to haunt it.

If 23-year old Mostert is paying attention to that history he is paying it no deference. But his team-mate Mark Winterbottom has lived through PRA’s decade of near misses. In the next few months we will find out if he is trapped by it.

Winterbottom entered SMP with a 256 points lead over Red Bull’s Craig Lowndes, with Mostert in third on 292 points.

By the end of the weekend Mostert had gone 1-3-1 and Winterbottom 2-8-16, which meant the former cut the latter’s points gap by 118 points to trail by 174 points.

Now we enter the two-driver Pirtek Enduro Cup, where a DNF at Sandown or Bathurst will cost up to 300 points and a non-finish in either of two 300km races at the Gold Coast 600, 150 points. So game on.

Mostert played down the gathering storm, insisting he didn’t care who won the championship as long as it was one of the PRA Fords; he’s such a nice and genuine bloke it was an almost believable line.

“We just have to be consistent and try to finish races but we’re a team and at the end of the day so if he (Winterbottom) gets it or I get it we’ve done the job for team,” he said.

“At the moment I just have to do my thing and keep tracking along and see what we do.”

Winterbottom’s comments to the motorsport website Speedcafe were more telling.

“The team should win it either way, but we’ll see. I’ve not given up, but the pressure is on him (Mostert) now.

“The championship is in his hands. I’m just the old bloke cruising along.

“This car hasn’t suited me as well as it’s suited him but we’ll keep pushing,” he added.

“He’s qualifying on pole because he’s quicker. We (on car #5) have got to use our other strengths and work out how we can still win it.

“But if he wins it, he wins it. I’m not going to tear up about it. It just will be what it will be.”

Believe that and I have got a bridge for you to buy! Winterbottom hides a fierce and competitive instinct behind a working-class-boy-done-good façade. He has so dominated proceedings at FPR over the last decade it became known in pitlane as Frosty Performance Racing.

But Mostert, as a product of PRA’s own development program, is now as much a favoured son as Winterbottom. The battle between the two of them on the track will be fascinating, how their friendship – and it is said to be strong -- evolves off it equally so.

While PRA, the FG X and Mostert were the class of the field in Sydney, six-time and defending champion Jamie Whincup broke through for his first win in 15 starts in his Red Bull Commodore in the soft-tyre Saturday afternoon sprint, despite a power-robbing broken header and the close attention of Brad Jones Racing’s Fabian Coulthard.

It was a bright moment for Whincup and indicates he and his usually dominant team are lifting out of a rare form slump. He is 449 points off the championship chase and almost certainly out of the title chase, but his form indicates he could well shape who wins it.

Teammate Lowndes’ chances took a mauling though. He proved unable to take proper advantage of Winterbottom’s poor weekend, to basically hold station. He finished ahead of his rival on Sunday, but only after giving him a solid whack in the bum and shovelling him out of the way as rain lashed down in the mid-section of the 200km race.

Post-race PRA protested Lowndes’s 10th place finish and the hearing will be heard at Sandown. If found guilty, the veteran will cop a points penalty, which won’t be appreciated considering he already lags Winterbottom by 255 points.

V8 Supercars Drivers’ Championship points (after 23 of 36 races):
1. Winterbottom -- 1915
2. Chaz Mostert -- 1741
3. Craig Lowndes -- 1660
4. David Reynolds -- 1633
5. Fabian Coulthard -- 1580
6. Jamie Whincup -- 1466
7. Garth Tander -- 1394
8. James Courtney -- 1373
9. Shane Van Gisbergen -- 1362
10. Rick Kelly -- 1145