MOTORSPORT: Winner Whincup!

Jamie Whincup has emerged from an incredible and unpredictable first-ever Newcastle 500 to win an unprecedented seventh Australian Supercars Championship.

The fight with Dick Johnson Racing Team Penske (DJRTP)’s Scott McLaughlin went down to the very end of the second 250km race on Sunday and only yo-yoed back Red Bull Holden Racing Team Commodore driver’s way when the New Zealander received a time penalty for a last lap clash with Craig Lowndes that dumped the Holden veteran into the fence.

“It was an unbelievable day from where I stand! Does it get any better than that?” Whincup declared post-race.

“We feel like we've worked the hardest and we deserve it and there's someone looking down on us and we got the ultimate result,” he said.

Incredibly it was McLaughlin’s third penalty of an uncharacteristically messy performance. He started from pole and led after perhaps his best start of the season, but a contentious drive-through penalty for speeding into pitlane, followed by a 15-second time penalty for spinning Simona De Silvestro’s Nissan, dumped him twice back deep into the pack in his Shell V-Power Ford Falcon FG X.

With Whincup leading the race and just over a lap to go, McLaughlin had passed James Moffat for 11th. If he had stayed there till the flag he would have tied his rival on points and won the driver’s championship on a win countback.

But he almost immediately slid wide at the first corner of the last lap, allowing the Caltex Commodore of Lowndes up the inside. While the move that saw Lowndes hit the concrete looked like a blatant block by McLaughlin, the Ford driver insisted post-race it wasn’t so.

“I lost my left-hand mirror early and obviously I knew we [he and Lowndes] were close but not that close,” he said.

“I defended my line to (Turn) Two and we interlocked. I genuinely didn’t mean to push him into the wall and to get pinged like that.”

The penalty dumped McLaughlin back to 18th and Whincup won the championship by 21 points. It was the Ford driver’s highest ever championship finish, but that’s unlikely to be much consolation for a while.

McLaughlin and Whincup’s respective teammates Fabian Coulthard and Shane van Gisbergen finished third and fourth in the championship, an appropriate result considering these two super-teams staged an incredibly fierce battle from the start of the season to, literally, the very end of the last race.

McLaughlin was lucky to make it to the chequered flag after Jason Bright’s Falcon climbed over the top of him during a concertina at a late-race restart that took a huge chunk out of DJRTP Falcon’s left-rear quarter.

The young Kiwi He had entered the Sunday race with the advantage over Whincup, who clashed with Nissan driver Michael Caruso on the second corner of the opening 250km race on Saturday. That punctured a tyre and put Whincup in the wall and then in the garage to repair broken suspension. He re-emerged 13 laps down and finished 21st, his 30-point advantage translated to a 78-point deficit.

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It was a great Saturday for DJRTP. With team majority owner Roger Penske in attendance, Fabian Coulthard followed McLaughlin across the line, scoring a one-two and wrapping up the teams’ championship.

That title has been the preserve of Triple Eight Race Engineering for the eight of the last nine years and its loss summed up a poor Saturday for the factory Holden operation. Apart from Whincup’s drama, van Gisbergen’s clumsy passing attempt on Erebus Motorsport’s David Reynolds robbed them both of a podium shot, while Lowndes also crashed out of podium contention.

But it was like the two teams had swapped colours on Sunday. Triple Eight was perfect in its chase of what Whincup admitted was a “long-shot” championship, while DJRTP suffered repeated setbacks. Coulthard was also caught speeding entering pitlane before his season ended with a driveline failure.

Whincup ‘s win was aided by van Gisbergen doing the dutiful team-mate thing and letting him by for the lead and the eventual win.

As he has been much of the season, McLaughlin was the fast-man of the final championship weekend, qualifying on pole twice as well as winning the Saturday race.

He finished the season with eight wins and a record-shattering 16 pole positions. Van Gisbergen was next best on five wins and three poles, while Whincup scored four wins and two poles and was super-consistent, finishing every race -- only four times outside the top 10.

Apart from Whincup the new venue was the big winner. While there was the usual driver criticism of it being a difficult track to pass on, the technical layout and long race distances ensured plenty of drama. The official estimate was the meeting had more than 190,000 attendees across its three days. There’s no doubt it was a big crowd.

Apart from the two big teams there were some other combatants who finished their year off on a high:

Virgin Australia Supercars Championship pointscore