Whincup wins as rivals stumble

Jamie Whincup has won the first race at the Queensland Raceway to bolster his championship assault, as his main rivals all fell by the wayside.

Whincup started from pole position after setting a time of 1:10.8529, which was only 0:00.0061 seconds faster than the Ford Performance Racing car of Mark Winterbottom, and he used the pole position to his advantage as he claimed his first ever V8 Supercar victory at the Queensland circuit.

“We haven’t had very good results here in the past. Although we test here we always seem to over engineer things on the day, so a huge win for us.”, said Whincup.

James Courtney was happy to have finished the race second, despite giving his all to try and pass Whincup.

“I was pushing him like hell hoping that he’d make a mistake but he showed that he’s the Champion and he made no mistakes so I’ll finish second do that.” Courtney said.

Winterbottom completed the podium places, despite skidding on the oil earlier in the race. After the race he commented on the season so far, and reflected on how both he and the team had hoped for more in 2009, “FPR should be up the front and we’ve always felt we could be; a couple of bad rounds probably hurt the morale a little bit, but all this hard work’s gone in and we get a result.”

Whincup’s main title rivals Craig Lowndes, Will Davison and Garth Tander all found themselves on the wrong end of some bad luck during the 100km race.

Lowndes, Whincup’s team mate at TeamVodafone, was forced to retire early on as his car started to lose oil on the circuit. He managed to get back to the pits where he pulled the car into the garage to allow the team to assess and repair the damage.

Will Davison retired on lap 15 with a broken axle, which was as a result of contact with Michael Caruso early in the race.

Davison was understandably disappointed after the retirement, but chose to look towards tomorrow, “On a positive note, we have fresh soft tyres for tomorrow, not many others do, so we’ll try claw back as many points back as we can.”, said Davison.

Tander added to the woe of the Holden Racing Team, when his car provided the Queensland track with it’s second helping of oil.

“With a handful of laps to go the engine in my Toll HRT Commodore let go. What started off as a positive day ended up quite disastrous, all we can do is change engines tonight, qualify as well as we can tomorrow hope for the best.” said Tander afterwards.

Ford claimed the top five positions, leaving Todd Kelly as the best placed Holden driver. The Jack Daniel’s driver had started the race in 10th and managed to climb to 6th by the flag.

A number of drivers chose not to use their sprint tyres during the first race, and that will make for an interesting race on Sunday.