Jamie Whincup – Car #1
“Everyone’s talking about last year’s results, but last year is last year. There’s been plenty going on at the start of this year and we haven’t quite been as fast as we would have liked. We certainly haven’t had shockers, we’ve been there or thereabouts, but we haven’t been the quickest car at the last two rounds, so we’ve got work to do. It’s quite a long two hours of practice on Friday, which is a fantastic opportunity to try a few things. Fingers crossed the weather’s nice and we get a full hill. It’ll be quite refreshing to go back to the grass roots of Australian motorsport. We’ve just come off two massive events, so this is a fairly different one, but one I enjoy just being a traditional event.”
Craig Lowndes – Car #888
“I’m looking forward to getting back to Tassie. We had a great run there last year and our car speed was really good. It’ll be nice to get back into the championship mode after the Grand Prix, so fingers crossed we can have another strong outing. It’s proven at the moment that the competition is going to be tough, but I believe that we can bounce back from what we had at Clipsal and the Grand Prix. It is a circuit that I enjoy and it’s one of only two where we lap in under a minute, so the lap times go very fast, but having that extra practice time is really going to be invaluable for our learning and understanding.”
Last year’s Tasmania event was more of an emotional rollercoaster than a teenage girl being denied access to a One Direction concert. The inter-Bull friendly fire, CL’s exclusion from qualifying, the epic charge to P5 that followed and ultimately RBRA’s first clean sweep – it all made for a script that could rival Days of Thunder.
However, as Jamie says, last year is last year and we’ve got a mountain of work before us to bounce back and challenge the form shown by other teams at Clipsal and the AGP. We hope that history will be kind to us, but there’s never really any way to guarantee that in this sport.
At a track where we lap in less than a minute and front-row starts are particularly influential on podiums positions, the action is often some of the most closely fought of the season. Over the years, 20 pole positions have been won by less than a tenth of a second, while the closest race-winning margin stands at 0.1038s, which was Jamie’s first place ahead of Craig in Race Three, 2008.
Tasmania Super Sprint – Symmons Plains Raceway
Circuit length: 2.4km
Circuit direction: Anticlockwise
Average speed: 167km/h
Maximum speed: 270km/h
Fastest point: Back straight
Slowest point: Hairpin
2014
JW | CL | |
Qualifying Race 1 | 1st | 2nd |
Race 1 | 1st | 8th |
Qualifying Race 2 | 1st | 25th |
Race 2 | 1st | 5th |
Qualifying Race 3 | 1st | 2nd |
Race 3 | 2nd | 1st |
Championship standings
1st – James Courtney, 258 points
2nd – Fabian Coulthard, 241 points
3rd – Garth Tander, 237 points
4th – Shane Van Gisbergen, 222 points
5th – Jamie Whincup, 216 points
6th – Craig Lowndes, 208 points
1st – HRT, 495 points
2nd – RBRA, 424 points
3rd – BJR, 402 points
4th – Jack Daniels, 320 points
5th – Pepsi Max Crew, 271 points