MOTORSPORT: Whincup, other winners … and a loser

A champion through and through
The big winners out of the Sydney 500 were Jamie Whincup – now a five-time V8 Supercar champion – and twilight racing, once the day’s Test cricket finished on Saturday. And don't forget Shane van Gisbergen.

Others, not only at the final round of the V8 Supercar Championship but for the season, were Tekno Autosports and Brad Jones Racing.

The disappointments for the V8 fraternity will have been the attendance at the Homebush Olympic precinct – which organisers announced as 131,000 for three days and admitted it was down on the previous four years – and the television audience for the race that finally decided the championship.

But no praise can be high enough for Whincup in equaling the five Australian touring car titles of Mark Skaife, Dick Johnson and the late Ian “Pete Geoghegan”, although every effort will be made at tonight’s presentation dinner to find new expression for his brilliance.

Not only has Whincup consistently beaten rivals including his Triple Eight Race Engineering and Holden teammate Craig Lowndes and Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom over many seasons now, but he won this title by racing hard when most drivers would have succumbed to the temptation to play it safe.

His victory on Saturday, amazingly, was his first at Homebush – his first podium even at the street circuit – and finishing 18th would have been enough for him on Sunday had Lowndes won – even lower with Lowndes fifth – but he fought pretty much to the end (almost too much with Jason Bright) and was on the podium again.

“I was really enjoying the battles … I couldn’t help but race,” Whincup said. “We are here to race. That was all part of it for me, to race hard.

“It was really good fun.

“It did occur to me it was risky, but you have got to have a go. I was thinking about all those fans who pay 100 bucks to watch this, so I wanted to put on a show. I just couldn’t help myself from having a crack.

“I live for this stuff. I love it. And to do it in the first year of the Car of the Future, on an even platform, it means even more.”

Whincup is the youngest driver to have won five titles – he’s 30 – and thoroughly deserves his place alongside those other three icons of the sport.
Surely he will go on to claim even more.

Yet he has recalled how “experts” tried to talk him out of joining Roland Dane’s Triple Eight in 2005 after he’d sat on the sidelines in 2004 when Garry Rogers Motorsport “benched” him after his 2003 rookie season.

“I pretty much said I would drive for nothing [in 2006] if you [Dane] can give me the opportunity,” Whincup said.

“I had some pretty high-calibre people tell me, ‘Don’t join the team, it’s crap. Craig Lowndes makes all his teammates look really ordinary – he has had seven different teammates in seven different years. You’ll end up back on the scrapheap’.

“But I backed myself, got a really good bunch of guys around me to really help me out and we started to move forward and develop.”
And the rest is history.

Lowndes’ shot at what would have been his fourth title, and first since 1999, was dashed on Saturday when he finished 15th – largely because of a refueling problem after contact from the man who had been the third championship contender, Winterbottom – and dropped 110 points behind Whincup.

Winterbottom lost third place in the final points on Sunday to departing FPR teammate Will Davison but has the consolation of having won the biggest race of the season, the Bathurst 1000.

Shane van Gisbergen’s season in a Holden with Tekno Autosports ended on a high after his controversial switch from Stone Brothers Racing that had morphed into Erebus Motorsport and fielded AMG Mercedes-Benzes instead of Fords without attaining a podium. 

Although he may not win any popularity contests among fellow drivers, van Gisbergen muscled fellow New Zealander Fabian Coulthard’s Brad Jones Racing (BJR) Commodore out of the way en route to third place on Saturday behind Whincup and Tekno boss Jonathon Webb.

Even with a 25-point penalty for his tactics on Coulthard, van Gisbergen’s follow-up win in the second 250km leg of the event on Sunday hoisted him to fifth in the championship – the very best he could have hoped for against Triple Eight and FPR when changing teams.

Tekno and BJR, courtesy of Coulthard and Bright, wound up ahead of Holden Racing Team in the teams’ championship – an excellent performance by what ought to be two mid-ranking oufits and an indictment on Holden’s factory team.    

And Russell Ingall went out as a full-time V8 Supercar racer with a bang, clawing his way to 10th in his final race from the second last row of the grid.

Twilight racing had the desired effect on the TV ratings for telecaster Seven, certainly after the half-hour switch to 7mate for the Saturday evening news in Sydney in Melbourne.

The average audience in the five major state capital cities for the first hour of the Saturday race was a rather modest 348,000, although that coincided with Australia grinding England into the turf in the Test match in Adelaide – screened on Nine.

However, the last hour of the Seven telecast of the V8s – after its news bulletins in Sydney and Melbourne – averaged 456,000 in the five cities.

That was 28.8 per cent higher than the average for last year’s Saturday race at Homebush and 13.7 per cent better than the previous best Saturday at the Sydney 500 – 401,000 in year one, 2009.

Last Saturday evening’s 456,000 made the last hour of the twilight telecast the No. 12 program for the day – the highest ranking achieved in the history of the Sydney 500.

The audience in the five capitals for the half-hour of Saturday’s telecast on 7mate was 174,000, indicating that viewers much preferred the news on Seven but many of them in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide then stuck with the channel for the last hour of the twilight race. (The whole race was on Seven in Perth, while for Brisbane viewers it finished on 7mate).

Although there were good signs in Saturday’s figures, the five-capitals average for Sunday afternoon’s championship-deciding race was 425,000.
Seven has said it’s “very happy” with this year’s Sydney 500 figures.

While the Sunday number is fractionally better than its equivalent for a couple of the earlier years, it means the championship decider attracted an average TV audience in the major capitals 212,000 smaller than the Sunday of the Gold Coast 600 six weeks earlier at 637,000 and just a third of that for the Bathurst 1000 two months ago at 1.26 million – and a similar fraction of the audience for the Adelaide Test.  

Saturday’s twilight race was a tick for the sport, but the Sydney 500 is still a long way short of what it was meant to deliver when V8 Supercar organisers cajoled the NSW government into subsidising it.

Other than a handful of glorious long shots towards the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the telecast does little to promote Sydney and, after the magnificence of Phillip Island on our screens two weeks earlier, the Homebush track is an eyesore, exceeded only by New Zealand’s abandoned Hamilton street circuit.

But this year’s Sydney 500 produced the youngest five-time Australian touring car champion – and that, and especially the way Whincup did it, is something to applaud and celebrate.

V8 Supercar Championship final driver points after 36 races – 1. Jamie Whincup (Holden) 3094 points; 2. Craig Lowndes (Holden) 2966; 3. Will Davison (Ford) 2799; 4. Mark Winterbottom (Ford) 2793; 5. Shane van Gisbergen (Holden) 2508; 6. Fabian Coulthard (Holden) 2501; 7. Jason Bright (Holden) 2381; 8. Garth Tander 2322; 9. David Reynolds  (Ford) 2058; 10. Scott McLaughlin (Holden) 1934.

V8 Supercar teams’ championship final points - Triple Eight Race Engineering 6100 points; 2. Ford Performance Racing 5617; 3. Brad Jones Racing 4927; 4. Tekno Autosports 4474; 5. Holden Racing Team 4330; 6. Garry Rogers Motorsport 3340.

Image: Red Bull Racing

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