Ipswich 400 Fast Facts
- Is there such a thing as a home advantage? We’ll soon find out because Queensland Raceway, a.k.a. The Paperclip (if you’re wondering, just take a look at a bird’s eye view), is RBRA’s test track, as well as five other cars’ on the 2014 grid.
- Triple Eight tops the pack for race wins at QR with eight to our name, six of those courtesy of Mr Craig Lowndes, whose record of 11 wins there throughout his V8SC career make him the master of The Paperclip.
- In fact, Lowndesy had an impeccable string of results across 2011 and 2012 here, claiming five from five race wins. Now that’s what you call on a roll.
- Our podium tally isn’t bad either, having claimed silverware at every event from 2005 onwards. Oh, apart from 2008. Let’s just forget that one.
- The Ipswich 400 brings up a milestone for JDub who hits his 150th V8SC event start. It’s a pretty significant place for this achievement to fall, QR being the track where he made his category debut back in 2002 and also where he won his first ever pole position in 2007. Now look at him – 57 poles to his name and tied with Peter Brock for the most of all time. Fingers crossed that record will become his this weekend.
Red Bull Racing Australia in Ipswich
| CRAIG | JAMIE | |
| Qualifying R1 | 6th | 1st |
| Race 1 | 4th | 1st |
| Qualifying R2 | 13th | 1st |
| Race 2 | 12th | 2nd |
| Qualifying R3 | 10th | 9th |
| Race 3 | 6th | 25th |
What the Drivers Say
Lowndesy: “It’s always good to race at our home track and QR’s been kind to us in the past. Last year didn’t quite give us the results we wanted, but the boys had a test day while I’ve been in Europe and fortunately Richo was around to jump in and take my place, so I’m very thankful to him.
“They did a lot of running on soft tyres and it was obviously great for Richo to get to spend a full day in the car, which is very rare for co-drivers, and hopefully they got a lot of information that will help us this weekend.”
J-Dub: “We’ve certainly had some really good times at QR, but we’ve had some bad times also with getting stuck in a rut and, you know, not deviating enough from when we test at the circuit to when we race, so we’ve got to be on the ball.
“We go back to the soft tyre, which we’ve been fairly heavily dominated on by our competitors over the last few rounds on the soft tyre.
“We had a good clean test day, we’ve got some good knowledge out of that, so I’m confident the engineers can do a good job to help us hopefully roll out of the truck competitively and keep up a good performance all weekend.”
Drivers Championship Standings
Mark Winterbottom – 1634
Jamie Whincup – 1538
Fabian Coulthard – 1361
Shane Van Gisbergen – 1355
James Courtney – 1354
Craig Lowndes – 1352
Teams Championship Standings
RBRA – 2940
FPR – 2757
HRT – 2514
BJR – 2371
Erebus – 1857
