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Geoffrey Harris1 Aug 2014
NEWS

MOTORSPORT: Spotlight back on home ground

V8 Supercars roaring at Queensland Raceway on soft tyres as title fight hots up and enduros loom

F1 boss trying to buy way out of criminal trial
The V8 Supercars are back in action after a month’s break, while Formula One is having a month off.

The use of soft tyres exclusively at Queensland Raceway should make for an exciting eighth round of the V8 Supercar Championship round at the six-turn 3.12km Ipswich circuit.

Craig Lowndes is sixth in the points and may be jet-lagged after competing in the Spa 24-Hour in Belgium, but he has a fabulous record at Queensland Raceway, although the title is shaping as a contest between his Triple Eight Holden teammate Jamie Whincup and Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom, who has a 96-point lead over Whincup.

Although F1 is on its northern summer holiday there is plenty going on away from the grand prix tracks.

Bernie Ecclestone is trying to settle his German criminal trial by paying state-owned Bayerische Landesbank a large whack – perhaps about another three quarters of the US$44 million he handed jailed banker Gerhard Gribkowsky, who he claims was blackmailing him.

A meeting of 83-year-old Ecclestone and top team principals that was to have been held last night to discuss F1’s fading popularity, particularly with TV viewers, was postponed until tomorrow because of Mercedes’ Toto Wolff’s broken arm. McLaren was not on the invite list, nor was motor sport’s governing Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), and Ecclestone seems to have done a U-turn on bringing in the controversial Flavio Briatore. Mercedes team chairman Niki Lauda said: “Why do we need Flavio? Bernie is the master of what we can improve.”

Ferrari has shaken up its engine department – long-time chief Luca Marmorini is out, while Mattia Binotto becomes chief of the hybrid power unit department and Lorenzo Sassi its chief designer. Will the changes produce the improvement to retain Fernando Alonso? It’s been noted that the first 33rd birthday greeting tweeted to the Spaniard this week was from McLaren, which is reuniting with Honda as its power unit provider next season.

Australia’s latest rising international open-wheeler talent, 18-year-old Anton DePasquale, is racing at Assen in Holland this weekend. He’s won four of his six races in Formula Renault 1.6 so far and been second in the other two. Formula Renault 2.0 is in his sights for next year.

NASCAR is on the tri-oval at Pocono, Pennsylvania, with Marcos Ambrose’s intentions for next year (whether he stays in the US or returns to V8 Supercars with a Roger Penske team) no clearer, while IndyCar is at Mid-Ohio, where Will Power will continue his quest for a first title against Brazilian Helio Castroneves, one of his Penske teammates.

Meanwhile, the second round of the new Formula E electric open-wheeler world championship in Malaysia has been postponed five weeks – to November 22, at the request of the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak. That has created a two-month gap from the opening round in Chinese capital Beijing on September 13.

Getting down and dirty here and over there
Major rallying at home and abroad this weekend – the fourth round of the Australian championship in South Australia and Rally Finland in the world championship.

Youngster Brendan Reeves and his co-driver sister Rhianon Gelsomino in a Mazda2 have a 16-point lead over last-starter winners Scott Pedder and Dale Moscat in a Renault Clio.

Rally SA comprises three heats this year, rather than the usual two, and will be cold, wet and wild.

The dominant Volkswagens have the jump in Rally Finland, with Finn Jari-Matti Latvala 4.5 seconds ahead of French world champion Sebastien Ogier after four stages – and more than a minute already to the 10th-placed Hyundai of New Zealander Hayden Paddon.

Hyundai’s WRC team leader, Belgian Thierry Neuville, is keen to contest a round of the new Rallycross World Championship in which the Korean manufacturer is yet to make a semi-final.

The series is being led by Norway’s 2003 WRC champion Petter Solberg but has had six different winners in its first six events, with the seventh round in Canada next weekend.

Promoter IMG said this week a round in the second series next year would be held at Barcelona’s F1 and MotoGP venue.  

Divide as Toyota doubles up on rally projects
Toyota is getting excited about rallying again, but there appears to be a split in its camp.

The Japanese manufacturer has not yet pressed the green light on a campaign in the next era of the WRC, starting in 2017, but a Yaris built at Toyota Motorsport in Germany has been tested in France and Sardinia and will be run on asphalt in Italy in August.

A GT86 CS-R3 also from Toyota’s Cologne facility will be used as the zero car at next month’s Rally Germany, driven by former WRC Ladies Cup winner Isolde Holdereid.

But overnight it emerged that another GT86, a four-wheel-drive version with a WRC designation, has been built by Tommi Makinen Racing in Finland.

A report on Autosport.com said this project had “the blessing of Akio Toyoda, the president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation” but “has nothing in common with the Yaris WRC that has been produced by Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne”.

“The directive for the four-wheel-drive GT86 has come from Japan and Autosport understands it is indicative of a cooling of relations between TMC and Cologne,” rally correspondent David Evans reported.

Naughty, naughty boys in NASCAR
Toyota’s top team in NASCAR is in hot water.

Joe Gibbs Racing has been penalised heavily for an offence ranked P5 on NASCAR’s new scale from P1 (lowest) to P6 (highest).

The Gibbs car of Denny Hamlin in last weekend’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis was found not to have its rear firewall block-off plates sealed.

NASCAR correspondent Bob Pockrass said these plates were intended to seal the driver’s compartment to keep hot fluids, smoke and fire from getting to the driver. Pockrass added: “Air flow through the block-off plates could help with the car’s aerodynamics during an event, and it is an obvious safety issue.”

Hamlin’s crew chief Darian Grubb has been suspended for six races and fined US$125,000. Another crew member was given a similar suspension and both are on probation for six months.

Hamlin was docked 75 points in the drivers’ championship, dropping him below Australia’s Marcos Ambrose, while Gibbs also lost 75 points in the owner standings.

Focus turns back on V8 Supercar Championship
A class podium and eighth outright in the Spa 24-Hour has whet Craig Lowndes’ appetite for more endurance racing overseas, but his focus for now is back on V8 Supercars at this weekend’s Queensland Raceway round.

After this SuperSprint round (two 100km races Saturday, one of 200km Sunday) there will be only one more, at Sydney Motorsport Park in three weeks, before the endurance events at Sandown, Bathurst and the Gold Coast in September-October.

Although he had a terrible round at Townsville four weeks ago, dropping to sixth in the championship, Lowndes has won 11 times at QR in 34 starts.

That’s six more wins at the track than the next best – Holden Racing Team’s Garth Tander’s five.

Before turning his attention to QR this week, Lowndes – annoyed at next February’s looming clash of the V8 Supercar test weekend with the Bathurst 12-Hour he won this year – told Autosport’s Gary Watkins at Spa of his international endurance ambitions.

“I definitely want to do Le Mans,” Lowndes said. “Doing V8s is great, but you are going around the same circuits all the time.

“I want to reach out and do other things. I want to come back [to Spa] in a pro car and go for the outright win.”

The Ferrari he co-drove last weekend ran in the pro-am class.

New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen, fourth in the V8 Supercar Championship and who was at Spa but did not get to race the McLaren he was in because it was crashed early by a British co-driver, also has bigger overseas ambitions.

Van Gisbergen co-drove a Porsche in America’s Daytona 24-Hour early this year, and is interested in the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta in October, as well as the Le Mans and Nurburgring 24-hour events in the longer term.

While there is only 10 points between Brad Jones Racing’s third-placed Fabian Coulthard, Van Gisbergen, HRT’s James Courtney and Lowndes in the V8 championship, all in Holdens, Ford’s series leader Mark Winterbottom and Lowndes’ teammate Jamie Whincup are well clear going into the QR round.

Winterbottom and the Falcon traditionally handle Dunlop’s soft rubber – to be used exclusively at QR – much better, while Whincup and the Commodore have struggled on it.

Ford had a historic 1-2-3-4 finish at QR last year – led by youngster Chaz Mostert, then with Dick Johnson Racing but now at FPR. That was Mostert’s first V8 “main game” victory and the 22-year-old already has won with FPR – in Perth in mid-May.

Winterbottom struggled at Townsville but FPR team principal Tim Edwards said: “We are confident of our soft-tyre pace [at Ipswich, which rewards strong mid-corner speed and traction out of turns]. But it is a tricky track, so we will have to be on our game.”

Winterbottom said QR was “more complex than it appears … [but] the soft tyre should help us”.

Whincup, 96 points behind the Ford man but 177 ahead of Coulthard, is hoping a recent test day at QR has helped him and his crew find the answer to his traditional tardiness on the soft rubber.

“It’s been our Achilles heel … [but] we’ve done a hell of a lot of work behind the scenes [over the past four weeks] to improve our performance on the soft,” Whincup said.

“We’ve been fairly heavily dominated by our competitors over the last few rounds on the soft tyres … time will tell this weekend if we’ve made a gain or whether we haven’t.”

HRT is upbeat after its new-found competitiveness at Townsville, especially a 1-2 in one of the races there, and with a new car coming for Tander after this round.

“Momentum is going in the right direction for us,” Tander said.

“We just need to make sure we have enough speed in qualifying so that we can start at the front.”

Along with Mostert, who is confident of rediscovering “that demon set-up” for a repeat success at QR because of his continued association with engineer Adam De Borre, another young star – Kiwi Scott McLaughlin – is “pretty confident” about QR.

“We [McLaughlin with Garry Rogers Motorsport] won here last year [with a Holden] and we have a faster car [a Volvo S60] now,” he said.

While Will Davison has set the pace in early practice in the AMG Mercedes E63 in which he claimed a podium at Townsville, the Nissan camp anticipates what Todd Kelly and James Moffat have called another “challenging” weekend.

“There are a couple of little things here and there on our cars that are new since the last round, which will give us a little bit of a gain,” Kelly said.

“We’re expecting it to be quite challenging. Hopefully the faster corners, turns one and two, are where we can claw back some time.”

A less optimistic Moffat said: “The layout of the circuit doesn’t suit our cars with the package we have at the moment.”

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Written byGeoffrey Harris
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