MOTORSPORT: Triple Eight enhances Triple A rating

After two seasons of the new-generation V8 Supercars that have seen the entry of three other brands against the traditional two, one thing remains unchanged — the pre-eminence of Triple Eight Race Engineering, the Holden Commodore VF and Jamie Whincup.

Sure, Ford Performance Racing has won the past two Bathurst 1000s with the FG Falcon and Volvo has made a sensationally successful entry to the championship this season, with its S60 winning four races and taking an equal-best 10 pole positions in the hands of Scott McLaughlin.

And, yes, two of the weekend’s three races at the Sydney 500 were cut short by rain, but Triple Eight Commodores won all three — the first two by Jamie Whincup and Sunday’s by Shane Van Gisbergen for Tekno Autosports.

Whincup’s record sixth title became official late on Sunday afternoon, but he wasn’t among the top three finishers in the season’s final race.

Instead, Holden Racing Team’s Garth Tander and James Courtney were, with Whincup fourth — and at last there was a proper championship celebration before he jets off to the Race of Champions in Barbados next weekend.

The mercurial Van Gisbergen jumped from fourth in the championship entering the final round to become runner-up to Whincup.

The points difference between first and second was 586 points - almost the maximum that any driver could score in two rounds.

That says so much about the performance of Triple Eight and Whincup, who trailed distantly early in the season yet ended up winning by the biggest margin in his six title seasons — which have come in just seven years.

On the last weekend of this championship Van Gisbergen leapfrogged Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom and Triple Eight’s Craig Lowndes, both of whom had horror rounds.

Other than Whincup’s 14 race victories this year, Van Gisbergen has had the next most wins — five in the sole entry of Jonathon Webb’s Tekno team with a Commodore built by Roland Dane’s Triple Eight.

Add Lowndes’ four wins and that’s 23 for Triple Eight-built cars in the 38 races this season. That’s a 60.5 per cent success rate.

Even without the Tekno/Van Gisbergen contribution, Red Bull Racing Australia — the name under which the Whincup and Lowndes cars have run in recent times — the success rate is 47.36 per cent. Still almost half the races in the championship.

In banking parlance, Triple Eight is Triple A-rated. It long has been, but even more so after this season.

The 18 wins by the Red Bull pair were three times the number of Ford Performance Racing (six -- four by Mark Winterbottom and two by Chaz Mostert) and six times as many as the other Holden factory-supported team, Holden Racing Team, owned by Walkinshaw Performance and in its first season under former Triple Eight lieutenant Adrian Burgess.

Two of HRT’s three wins were by James Courtney, the other by Garth Tander, who let slip another with a mistake just before the safety car came out for what were to be the final laps of the season at Homebush on Sunday.

HRT at least was happy with having Tander and Courtney on the podium on the last day of the championship, but overall it is still some considerable distance behind Triple Eight — certainly in terms of consistency.

And sandwiched between these two Holden factory-backed squads was FPR, courtesy of its early-season form -- when Winterbottom opened up a big lead — and young Chaz Mostert’s miraculous Bathurst victory.

FPR and HRT have won three of the past four Bathurst 1000s, and four of the past six, but over the course of championships they have not been in the same league as Triple Eight (which has won the other two Great Races in the past six years — still a 33 per cent success rate at Mt Panorama in that time).

The only combination to have beaten Whincup and Triple Eight to the season title in the past seven years was Courtney in the second and last of his seasons with long-time Ford team Dick Johnson Racing in 2010.

It may now fall to DJR — already with links to, and from next year under majority ownership of, America’s mighty Team Penske — to mount a bigger challenge to Whincup and Triple Eight than FPR and HRT have been able to do.

However, 2003-04 V8 Supercar champion Marcos Ambrose’s comeback to Australian racing with DJR-Penske in Sydney, after almost a decade in America’s NASCAR, was underwhelming.

Like Lowndes, Ambrose crashed on Saturday morning and, after qualifying way back in the field, was classified 20th, 21st and 16th in the three races, with the best that could be claimed for him being that his fastest lap on Sunday was just 0.01 seconds slower than DJR stablemate David Wall.

Roger Penske, one of the most successful race team operators in history, will bring extra resources and professionalism to DJR, but it may take a year or two, perhaps a new brand (after Ford’s pullout at the end of 2015) and perhaps another accomplished driver to dethrone the king(s).

DJR has been only a shadow of the team it once was in recent times and ended this season with the embarrassment of being caught removing centre of gravity ballast seals from the engine of the Falcon that Scott Pye has driven for it.

“It was a fundamental mistake that should never have occurred,” a DJR spokesman admitted. And the loss of championship points from the Phillip Island and Gold Coast rounds because of it has dropped Pye from 16th to 19th in the championship.

He is a young talent without the certainty of a drive in the series next year — Nick Percat is another. Holden will be keen to steer Percat into a seat, perhaps in one of the two Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport entries following the return there of the disputed second Racing Entitlement Contract after the settlement of court action.

Playing second-string to Ambrose at DJR-Penske could be good for Pye, but his career is under the control of Triple Eight’s Roland Dane — the man Penske will be trying to topple on the track.

Driving talent alone isn’t going to threaten the dominance of Whincup and Triple Eight.

It’s going to take a great driver, a great team, and — unless Scott McLaughlin and Volvo, or perhaps Shane Van Gisbergen in equal equipment, can do it in the next year or two -- perhaps it won’t happen until after the arrival in 2017 of new makes or models with turbocharged cars under the Gen2 regulations.

It’s going to take much more commitment than that of Nissan Motorsport, without a win this season but a lucky second at Bathurst and Michael Caruso 10th in the championship, or Erebus with privateer Mercedes E 63 AMGs which — like Nissan’s Altimas — have produced just one win in two years.

With the standards Whincup and Triple Eight have set over many years now, culminating in winning the championship by almost 600 points this season, they’re going to take a power of catching.  

Image: Red Bull Racing