MOTORSPORT: Six out of six for Holden

The more things change the more they stay the same in the V8 Supercar Championship, it seems.

After six championship races this year only the two traditional makes have been represented on the podium. One of them, Holden, has won all six of those races. And Ford won the four non-championship races at the Grand Prix.

Triple Eight Race Engineering has won two-thirds of the championship races this season, including all three at Tasmania's Symmons Plains at the weekend.

Sure Scott McLaughlin has had a wretched mechanical run with his Volvo and Will Davison has shown some pace in one of Betty Klimenko's Mercedes and might consider himself unlucky not to have jagged one or even two big results in Tassie.

But Rick Kelly is the only driver of one of the "new" makes in the championship in the top 10 on the points table – and he's ninth. The top five drivers are in Holdens.

Jamie Whincup has jumped to the top of the table after his win in the longest race of the weekend at Symmons Plains.

He and Triple Eight Race Engineering teammate Craig Lowndes are the two multiple winners in the championship so far this year.

Lowndes, winner of both Saturday sprints in Tassie, might have been the series leader if not for a stop-go penalty for clobbering David Reynolds' Ford on Sunday's opening lap.

Lowndes still climbed back to finish sixth and in Perth on the first weekend of May could notch his 100th race win.

While Ford is the second best of the makes, its drivers have accounted for only three of the 18 podiums so far in this championship – with Mark Winterbottom and Chaz Mostert both scoring one at the weekend, while David Reynolds and young New Zealander Andre Heimgartner were impressive too.

It's the third year of the rules that allowed other makes to participate, yet there's been very little change at the top of the results sheets. For some 2017 and the Gen2 regulations can't come soon enough.

V8 Supercar Championship driver standings after six races – 1. Jamie Whincup (Triple Eight Race Engineering, Holden Commodore) 483 points; 2.  James Courtney (Holden Racing Team, Holden Commodore) 464; 3. Craig Lowndes (Triple Eight Race Engineering, Holden Commodore) 460; 4. Garth Tander (Holden Racing Team, Holden Commodore) 457; 5. Shane van Gisbergen (Tekno Autosports, Holden Commodore) 456; 6. Mark Winterbottom (Prodrive Racing Australia, Ford Falcon) 433; 7. Fabian Coulthard (Brad Jones Racing, Holden Commodore) 403; 8. David Reynolds (Prodrive Racing Australia, Ford Falcon) 303; 9.  Rick Kelly (Nissan Motorsport, Nissan Altima) 299; 10. Chaz Mostert (Prodrive Racing Australia, Ford Falcon) 296.

Pye finished either 17th or 18th in all three races at Symmons Plains – about where Ambrose might have been expected to be, even in front of his old home crowd.

 So the thinking in the DJR Team Penske camp is that the problem is not in the driver's seat but in the way its FG X Falcon handles hard-compound front tyres.

Between now and the WA round of the championship DJR Team Penske has to try to figure out what Prodrive Racing Australia, which has built all five FG Xs running, is doing right that it's not doing.

Pye is likely to remain in the seat for WA.

While the pickings have been slim for the new union of Dick Johnson Racing and Team Penske in Oz, Roger "The Captain" Penske's American racing outfits march on.

Penske's four Chevrolet-powered IndyCars finished first, second, fourth and fifth in the opening round of that series on the streets of St Petersburg in Florida today, with Juan Pablo Montoya holding out Australian Will Power for victory.

Penske's NASCAR drivers Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski are second and fourth in Fords in the Sprint Cup, being led by Chevrolet's reigning champion Kevin Harvick after Keselowski finished second, on the bumper of victorious Toyota man Denny Hamlin, in the latest round at Martinsville Speedway, Virginia.

Power lost the lead of the IndyCar race to Montoya on the last round of pitstops and made an audacious attempt to regain it, damaging his front wing in the process.

"If I hadn't damaged my wing maybe I would have had another shot," Power said.

"He was very strong on the front straight and my exits weren't very good. I thought maybe I would catch him off-guard there.

"You don't expect someone to pass there, so I gave it a shot. I was surprised at how aggressively he turned, but he wanted to win the race and so did I."

Montoya, who notched his second victory since returning to IndyCar from NASCAR last year, said he saw Power make his move "but he was way too far and I wasn't going to give him the position".

"If he was beside me I would have said, 'OK, go ahead'. When I got to the turning point he wasn't even close. It is a shame we touched, but it's all good, it's racing."

It was the 175th IndyCar victory for Team Penske and its 78th on road or street courses.

"It was a fight between our two guys in front. It was just an amazing weekend. Wow, what a day," Penske said.

His Brazilian veteran Helio Castroneves and French recruit Simon Pagenaud were fourth and fifth, behind the Chip Ganassi Racing's Tony Kanaan, while American Ryan Hunter-Reay was the highest-placed of the Honda-powered drivers in seventh.

Australian Matthew Brabham finished 11th and seventh in the two Indy Lights races at St Petersburg but set the fastest lap in the first of them.

However, Eli Evans and co-driver Glen Weston won the second heat at timber town Nannup and took overall honours for the event in their Citroen DS3.

Simon Evans, like his brother Eli a former national champion, finished second in Sunday's second leg with co-driver Ben Searcy in a Honda Type-R, while Taylor was third – which was enough for her to be runner-up for the weekend with five points less than Eli Evans.

Taylor, the daughter of Coral Taylor, who partnered Toyota legend Neal Bates to four national championships, is driving the Renault Clio in which Scott Pedder won last year's ARC.

She has returned from several years overseas and is being co-driven by former policeman Bill Hayes.

They had a scare on Saturday when the Renault's steering failed on the transport stage ahead of the second last stage.

Evans and Searcy copped a 45-second penalty early on the first leg because of driveshaft problems with the Honda, which the younger Evans had driven to national championship success.

Swiss driver Neel Jani piloted the quickest of the Porsches and Australia's Mark Webber clocked the second best time before the manufacturer, in its second year back in top-level sports car racing, concentrated on long runs.

Audi was the second fastest make with its updated R18 e-tron quattros, ahead of the reigning WEC champion Toyota.

The WEC starts next month with a six-hour race at Britain's Silverstone, with another six-hour race at Belgium's Spa before France's "crown jewel" Le Mans 24-Hour in June.

The car – driven by Brit Jann Mardenborough, the most celebrated graduate of Nissan's GT Academy for computer gamers, and which took flight somewhat like Mark Webber's experiences in a Mercedes sport car at Le Mans and a Red Bull F1 machine at Valancia in Spain – has been impounded.

Spectators taken to hospital have been released, as has Mardenborough, who is scheduled to race in GP3 this year and co-drive Nissan's radical front-engined Le Mans entry.

The crash happened at the Flugplatz corner; the race was halted and not completed.

One of Mardenborough's co-drivers at the weekend was Belgian Wolfgang Reip, another gamer who was one of the three drivers of the victorious GT-R at February's Bathurst 12-Hour along with Japan's Katsumasu Chiyo and Germany's Florian Strauss.   

Montagny tested positive after the second round of the new all-electric open-wheeler championship in Malaysia last November.

He had finished second in the first round of the series in China, driving for America's Andretti Autosport.

Montagny, 36, drove seven Formula One grands prix in 2006 for the now-defunct Super Aguri team and also had competed in the A1 GP series that infamously collapsed.

He admitted when news of his positive test became public that his racing career was as good as finished.

Picture  courtesy of Red Bull Racing Australia