MOTORSPORT: One hell of a start

If the rest of the V8 Supercars championship proceeds like the Clipsal 500, we are in for one hell of a season.

It all started with a relatively processional win for Jamie Whincup and his Red Bull Holden Commodore VF in the opening race of the season for the third year in a row on the Adelaide parklands circuit. But then things just started getting weirder and wilder. Indeed, the action escalated faster than a Cold War arms race, until complete outsider Nick Percat was being crowned Clipsal champion and Nissan’s Michael Caruso was headed home to Melbourne Sunday night as the drivers’ championship points leader.

But that’s what yet another off-season ramp-up in competitiveness of the grid, some stunning racing, climate change and refueling rules that not every team comprehended, will do for you.

Trying to cover off all the dramatic incidents that occurred in Sunday’s main event would require thousands of words. But one, bedlam, is a good start.

Three days of boiling heat evaporated to be replaced by thunderous rain just as the field took off for the 78-lap main event. In the end, after multiple safety car interventions (including at the very start of the race) two torrential downpours and a temporary cessation of hostilities with all cars parked in pitlane, it was decided by a four-lap sprint to the ‘time certain’ (that means TV-dictated) finish.

Percat became the first South Australian to win the Clipsal because his engineer Chris Stuckey recognised the requirement to dump a minimum 140 litres of fuel into his Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport Commodore didn’t change no matter how long the race.

Post-race social media erupted, slagging and sledging race control and V8 Supercars for the way the race had been started and the insistence that the fuel drop be enforced when little more than half distance was completed.

Those that didn’t get the fuel dropped, including the two DJR Team Penske Ford Falcons of Fabian Coulthard and Scott Pye that finished second and third on the road, copped 60-second penalties and were sent tumbling down the order.

But the controversy shouldn’t detract from Percat’s great drive to deliver the battling team’s first victory – indeed first podium – in its seven-year history. He kept it his SP Tools Commodore off the walls when plenty of others couldn’t.

It was an especially sweet and symbolic win as the 27-year-old is Adelaide-born and has been coming to this venue for races since he was only a few months old in 1988.

It was just as sweet for team owner Lucas Dumbrell, who formed LDM a year after he became a quadriplegic in a Formula Ford accident at the age of 19 in 2009. He is the brother of Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 winner and minority Triple Eight Race Engineering team owner Paul Dumbrell and the son of automotive entrepreneur, motorsport enthusiast and former racer, Garry Dumbrell.

Dumbrell hired Percat for the 2015 season after he was left on the sidelines at Walkinshaw Racing because of a sponsorship shortfall. Now, it’s Dumbrell’s own funding limitations that are looming as an issue as he has guaranteed backing for only the first two races of the year.

Percat doesn’t win often, but he picks the good ones when he does; his only other V8 Supercars victory was in the 2011 Bathurst 1000 with Holden Racing Team’s Garth Tander, who finished third behind his former protégé yesterday.

Sandwiched between them was Caruso in the NISMO Nissan Altima. A fiery Italian who gets annoyed when he is struggling to be competitive (so he has spent a fair amount of his time at Nissan Motorsport being annoyed), Caruso’s result was the pinnacle of a strong weekend for Nissan that also included two sixths for our man Todd Kelly in carsales.com.au entry.

So is Caruso a serious contender to win the drivers’ championship? It seems a step too far even if the Nissans appear to have made a significant progress.

Instead it’s Whincup who really stood out with his speed on Saturday in his Red Bull Holden Commodore VF, backing his dominant win up with a close second behind the Holden Racing Team’s James Courtney in a quite exceptional second 125km race.

Courtney was at his courageous, car-controlling best to hold Whincup off, sliding wildly through the 200km/h turn eight on the last lap to ensure his win. On Sunday neither man had anything to show for their efforts, but Whincup left the meeting second in the points, clearly high on motivation.

He holds the early advantage over his new teammate Shane van Gisbergen – who was struggling with illness and car set-up on Saturday and then gyrated off the road three times in an unusually clumsy performance for a rain-master on Sunday.

There were plenty of others who showed flashes of brilliance and other less positive traits.

In other action:

Chaz Mostert claimed a pole and a third place in his return from injuries sustained in his horrific Bathurst shunt. But, as has happened the last two years, he couldn’t get through the meeting unscathed, crashing his Prodrive Falcon at turn eight on Sunday.

DJR Team Penske started its second year claiming two out of the three poles on offer via Pye and Coulthard. But race pace wasn’t so convincing, nor the strategies and pit stops, which still require work.

By contrast Craig Lowndes, making his debut for T8 satellite Team Vortex, had race pace on Sunday but lacked qualifying speed.

Defending champion Mark Winterbottom wasn’t a factor in his Prodrive Falcon, but then he didn’t do much here last year either.

Scott McLaughlin showed pace in the Wilson Security Volvo. His new teammate James Moffat didn’t.

Moffat wasn’t alone among the new recruits showing little to form a positive impression from; add Tekno’s Will Davison, Nissan’s Dale Wood, Team Kiwi car crusher Chris Pither, BJR duo Tim Slade and Tim Blanchard, CS Racing’s Lee Holdsworth, LDM’s Andre Heimgartner and Erebus rookie Aaren Russell to that list.

Speaking of Erebus, David Reynolds did well for his new team, coming fifth based on the right fuel drop strategy in the ex-Walkinshaw Commodore Betty Klimenko’s team now races instead of the Mercedes-AMG E 63s.