MOTORSPORT: Strategy calls key to V8 victory

Ford star Mark Winterbottom says his roller-coaster ride in last weekend’s Perth round of the V8 Supercars Championship shows how important it is to get your race strategy right.

Winterbottom finished Saturday in Perth riding high in his Prodrive Racing Australia Pepsi-Max Ford FG X Falcon with a pole, two wins and the championship lead by one point over perennial rival Jamie Whincup in the Red Bull Holden Commodore VF.

But PRA’s decision to put all four team cars on the same soft-hard-recycled-soft tyre strategy for the longer double-points Sunday race backfired when a safety car put drivers going hard-hard-soft in the box seat.

Top three finishers Will Davison (Erebus/Solar Australia), Craig Lowndes (Triple Eight/Red Bull) and Fabian Coulthard (BJR/Freightliner) all used this strategy.

The 2013 Bathurst winner’s issues were compounded by how far he plummeted from the lead in the final stages of the 200km race on his soft tyres when his team-mate and 2014 Bathurst champ Chaz Mostert managed to hang in there to finish fourth on similarly worn Dunlop rubber.

Winterbottom’s poor finish in the Sunday race meant he dropped to third in the championship 74 points behind Lowndes. Crucially he also failed to take maximum advantage of a rare bad day for Whincup, who ran off early and finished 19th.

“It’s a disaster for sure because it’s massive points,” 33-year old Winterbottom said.

“You don’t get given easy rounds a lot of the time and Whincup doesn’t have many bad rounds either. He has one, you just cannot finish 15th. So we didn’t do a good enough job.”

Winterbottom and PRA are fighting to claim their first-ever drivers’ and teams’ championship in 2015 after more than a decade of trying together and in their last year with official Ford backing.

In the same era Whincup has won six drivers’ championships and Triple Eight Race Engineering six teams’ championships.

Winterbottom was reasonably philosophical about PRA’s overall strategy backfiring at Barbagallo Raceway: “You can’t predict when the safety car is going to come out. In Tassie we started on hards, there was no safety car and that screwed us over.”

What clearly concerned him most was he and Mostert were not better separate in terms of tyres runs and refuelling times.

“The guys (in the pits) were trying to race each other and that’s not what we have got to do,” he said. “If I had finished second to Chaz winning I would have been more than happy with Sunday’s race because you have to maximise your points and not try and race each other.

“That was probably our biggest thing -- you look back on last Sunday and say ‘we did wrong’; both going soft tyres, both going longer than we had to in that first stint and putting fuel in the car against each other.

“Those are things we must make sure we don’t get drawn into because if you focus on one person then everyone else will overtake you and that’s what happened.

“Chaz and I have a good understanding but we just need to make sure we don’t race each other on the same strategies and stuff.”

Mostert pitted from second place on lap 16 to start his hard tyre stint while Winterbottom stopped on the 19th lap after leading from the green light.

“The first stint we could have done 10 laps or really shortened it up to make sure those tyres were fresh to go on for the last stint,” Winterbottom explained. “We could have done one (car) as early as lap five and then one a bit longer, but we come in at very similar times. We could have split it a lot more.”

Winterbottom said the team would examine the issue before Winton, but had already acknowledged it had made the wrong call on strategy.

“We will definitely look at it, but they know it was the wrong call. You don’t go off about it, you back the team.”

Winterbottom said his car’s lack of performance at the end of the race compared to Mostert also needed examination.

“I am not sure why my tyres blew out as bad as they did. I have some issue somewhere,” he said. “Chaz was driving really hard and I was driving really conservative and his car held on to its tyres and mine blew up with about 20 to go.

“We should have still finished fourth or fifth and been OK. Traditionally I have been a lot better on tyre life than everyone … Our tyres should have lasted longer, something has gone on that has caused a massive blow-out of times.

“There is something somewhere. My hard tyre pace was reasonable. My car wasn’t 100 per cent, but that soft tyre just fell apart. But you never know for sure until you go back and review.”